Yandex Starts To Drink From The Twitter "Firehose"

Yandex Starts To Drink From The Twitter “Firehose”

Feb 21, 2012 at 12:47am ET by Greg Sterling

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 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.

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.”

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Twitter | Twitter: Business Issues | Twitter: Search

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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http://www.kleemi.com KOS

The twitter “firehose” is nothing more than twitter selling access to “Community” generated content for hundreds of millions of dollars of which no percentage will ever be returned to the “Community” that has created it.
I think that it is a travesty that we continue to call the out right theft and reselling of “Community” created value a “firehose”
How about a simple transparent diagram showing the process of: value creation, value extraction, as well as revenue flows and “firehose” deal details…I believe that because twitter and others have chosen to create a term “firehose’ that seems benign they have been able to escape any close examination of a business process that on its face is inequitable and certainly can be viewed by many as unethical….

Its time for a change. “Communities” create billions of dollars in “Value” and should be treated with respect and fairness.

We the “Community” that have allowed our value to be extracted by Twitter, Facebook and others so that they can generate billions deserve better than to be treated like products that are sold to the highest bidders. The Communities that add the value should be treated with respect.

I have been attempting to develop technology with the idea that the “Community” that creates and adds value should come “First”

Kleemi is an attempt to brings this dream into reality. Kleemi is in an early beta but at this point still offers cutting edge search, a news reader, and a micro blog service. In the coming weeks we will make some major announcements about some of our new service that will turn the pyramid right side up.