Yahoo’s search team needed the past few weeks to prep their latest crawlers for its sojourns onto the World Wide Web. This new mutli-legged beast began its official rollout, as noted on the Yahoo Search blog.

“The new Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 recognizes the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives for ‘Yahoo! Slurp,’ though it’ll identify itself as Slurp 3.0 in your web logs,” the blog said. A handful of webmasters may notice a couple of changes.

“Please note that if you’re using IP-based recognition of our crawlers, you might see a drop in crawl/coverage from Yahoo! We strongly recommend that you move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp if you’re using any other method to avoid this problem,” they said. The IP ranges for Yahoo’s crawlers will change to a smaller set, too.

The other concept applies to robots.txt files and directives. Yahoo Slurp 3.0 will recognize existing entries for ‘Slurp’ or ‘Yahoo Slurp’, but not a reference to ‘Slurp/2.0.’ Yahoo thinks those entries are rare enough anyway, but just in case, it was prudent for them to reference it.