Is there a way to make Magento indexing more intelligent?

I would like like to know if it is possible to make a new method to only update indexes on products which have changed since I run a store with 206000 records in the core_url_rewrite table and need to update product status everyday.

It takes 8 hours using a CLI call to index开发者_如何学Python.php --reindex catalog_url.

Listen for the catalog_product_save_after event and update individual rows as they need updating, that way you won't have to perform full indexing everyday. Actually this is what's supposed to already happen so think, what are you doing that breaks this?