Russian search giant Yandex has struck a deal with Twitter, giving searchers immediate access to as many as 250 million daily tweets.
Twitter will license “the full feed of all public tweets” to the search engine, with new tweets becoming available in search results “in a matter of moments,” Yandex said in a statement.
The agreement will make the posts of the more than 2 million users who tweet in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Kazakh available to Yandex users, as well as the most popular feeds in other languages.
The search can be conducted via Yandex’s Blog Search or a new website, Twitter.yandex.ru.
“Through this partnership, Yandex and Twitter will work together to make it easier for Yandex users in Russia and elsewhere to find real-time content about the people and things they care about most,” April Underwood, Twitter’s business development director said in the statement.
Twitter currently has more than 100 million active users across the world.
Google didn’t renew a similar agreement with Twitter after it expired in July. It went on to release “Search Plus Your World,” favoring Google+ connections in search results, and souring the relationship between the two companies further.
Meanwhile, Bing has access to Twitter and Facebook.
New York-listed Yandex has market share of about 60 percent in Russia, compared with Google’s 25.9 percent, according to LiveInternet.ru, a market research portal.
Yandex also launched a new tool Monday designed to search social networks. It will allow users to quickly find people by their profiles.
“We are currently concentrating on social-networking searches,” said Anton Pavlov, a blog search manager at Yandex. “The partnership with Twitter reinforces our efforts in this area,” he said.
Yandex’s new offerings include the roll out of a beta version of a “people finder” for its Russian site. Users can view all public profiles of a person with accounts on sites like VKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Odnoklassniki (popular services in that country).
“It is so much more convenient to see multiple profiles of the same person grouped together,” says Yandex Product Manager Alexander Chubinskiy. “Yandex does this grouping with care — only those profiles that refer to one another get grouped. Web users can choose if they want their profiles on different websites to appear in search results separately, or as grouped together. So, if one of your personal profiles refers to others, the icons of those websites on which they are hosted will appear on the same thumbnail. Conversely, the user can remove cross-reference from their personal pages so that each of the profiles appears in Yandex’s search results independently.”
