Russian internet group Yandex has signed an agreement with Facebook for access to content from some of the social networking site's users. The agreement with Facebook gives Yandex full access to the social network's "firehose" of public data. As of today, public content from Facebook users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries and Turkey will be available for indexing by Yandex as soon as it has been published.

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 current 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.

Yandex will use data from Facebook's public firehose feed to improve the quality of its search results. Yandex's search results will incorporate articles and videos that have had particular resonance on the social network.

Yandex is already working with Twitterand indexes status updates in LiveJournal, VK and others.

Yandex leads the world's biggest search engine Google in Russia with a market share of more than 60 percent and mainly derives its revenues from text search-based advertising.