Yandex Partners With Twitter

Twitter and Russian search engine Yandex have agreed a partnership that will allow Yandex to show new tweets in its search results almost instantly.

New tweets will become available in Yandex's Blog Search results "in a matter of moments", Yandex said. 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.

Yandex search for Twitter is word-form sensitive and corrects typos. The system's users can search by username or by hashtag.

"With more than 250 million tweets a day, Twitter is a valuable information source and the fastest way to find out what's happening in your world," said April Underwood, Twitter Director of Business Development. "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."

"We are currently concentrating on social networking search. This partnership with Twitter reinforces our effort in this area," says 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."

Yandex has about 60 percent market share in Russia, ahead of Google with about a quarter of the market.

Google no longer partners with Twitter, favoring its own Google+ social network for social search results.

Twitter and Yandex declined to give financial details of their agreement. Microsoft has been reported to have paid $30 million for its deal with Twitter.

In addition to integrating Twitter feeds into its search results, Yandex has also updated its Blog Search API, a webmaster tool for creating services based on microblogging content.