Russian search giant Yandex announces today a partnership agreement with Facebook, giving Yandex access to Facebook’s “Firehose” of public data coming from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries, and Turkey. This plays into the “social search” trend that we’ve seen social networks move to, with Bing’s partnership with Facebook, and Google’s huge efforts being put into their homegrown social network, Google+.
According to Yandex’s press release:
The agreement only covers data from Facebook users in the above countries, published under “Public” privacy settings. Users can find out what those on the social network are saying about the latest headline news events, for example, or the latest movies. In the near future, Yandex’s search results will display not only Facebook users’ posts but also others’ comments on them. Profiles and posts that Facebook users mark “Private” will not be searchable.
The partnership can be seen as similar to Bing and Facebook’s deal, where Bing search users can see what their friends have liked in search results, when searching for films or other items.
Yandex already works with Twitter in a similar way, as well as LiveJournal, VK and others.
