Yandex Starts To Drink From The Twitter “Firehose”

Yandex is the next in line to gain access to the Twitter “firehose.” The Russian search engine is announcing that it will begin integrating the Twitter feed into its search results. Twitter reported the deal to us late last week but declined to disclose its terms. As part of their agreement Yandex will have access […]

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Screen Shot 2012 02 20 At 9.04.01 PMYandex is the next in line to gain access to the Twitter “firehose.” The Russian search engine is announcing that it will begin integrating the Twitter feed into its search results.

Twitter reported the deal to us late last week but declined to disclose its terms. As part of their agreement Yandex will have access to the full Twitter feed but has discretion over what it uses and how that content is ranked and displayed.

According to a statement issued by Yandex:

New tweets will now become available in Yandex’s Blog Search results in a matter of moments. In addition to Yandex’s Blog Search, users who search for something on Twitter will also find the same results via twitter.yandex.ru. Tweets of over two million users are available for search on Yandex. 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 . . .

The system’s users can search by username or by hashtag.

Screen Shot 2012 02 21 At 6.10.18 AM

On Monday Yandex also announced “social networking search.” The company is incorporating profile-based content from social sites (i.e., VKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal and Odnoklassniki) into its search results:

Yandex processes over two million people searches daily. About one half of these search queries are to find information about celebrities, while the other half ask about someone’s friend, a contact, an employee or a partner. In response to these queries, Yandex delivers links to personal profiles on social networking websites available for public access – only those pages that can be indexed by a search engine. Currently, Yandex’s index has about 250 million personal profile pages hosted on various blogging platforms and social networking websites.

Twitter becomes yet another important source of social content for Yandex. Reportedly in mid-2011 Twitter crossed the 1 million-user mark in Russia.

Yandex says it controls roughly 61 percent of search traffic in Russia. According to comScore, the company’s flagship yandex.ru site had approximately 45 million visitors in December, 2011. In addition to Russia, Yandex operates in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and most recently Turkey.

In September of 2011 Bing renewed its deal with Twitter for a rumored $30 million. Twitter also has a relationship with Yahoo, but in a well-publicized break Google and Twitter did not renew their deal last year (apparently Twitter’s decision). That rift has become more acrimonious lately as Twitter and Google have feuded publicly over Google’s recently introduced “Search Plus Your World.”


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About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

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