Twitter has today announced a partnership agreement with Russia’s search engine giant Yandex. Via the deal, the microblogging site will license the full feed of all public tweets, which it terms a ‘firehose’ of data, to Yandex’s search engine. The duo have not revealed the financial terms of the deal.
Twitter has a similar deal with Microsoft’s Bing. It used to have a paid search agreement with Google, but this agreement ended last July, and has so far not been renewed.
Yandex is Russia’s most popular search engine, taking a 60-65pc share of the marketplace, with Google lagging behind at 25pc.
Yandex, which went public in 2011, also operates in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey.
Today’s deal with Twitter means that Yandex users who use its Blog Search will be able to spot the most up-to-the-minute tweets. And the focus will be on social search, Yandex confirmed.
As well as this, users who search for something on Twitter will also find the same results via twitter.yandex.ru. Users can search by username or by hashtag.
Yandex said that tweets of more than 2m users are available for search on Yandex. It said Twitter posts of those users who tweet in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, as well as top feeds in any other language, will be included in Yandex’s Blog Search results.
April Underwood, Twitter’s director of business development, spoke today about the partnership, pointing to how it would make it easier for Yandex users in Russia and elsewhere to find useful, real-time content.
“We are currently concentrating on social networking search. This partnership with Twitter reinforces our effort in this area,” added Anton Pavlov, Yandex’s Blog Search manager. “People share news, exchange opinions and discuss all sorts of matters in real time all the time. This kind of information will help us enhance our search results.”
