Facebook has entered into a deal with Russian search engine Yandex which will allow the search engine to index data publicly available on the social media service. In return, Yandex will deliver extra traffic to Facebook.
Google might be the world’s most used search engine; however, it is a different story in Russia where they favour using their own local services. Even Facebook comes in second to VKontakte, a Russian social networking site. Facebook’s deal with Yandex may be the boost it needs to establish a proper foothold in the region.
Yandex will be using Facebook’s data in two ways. Firstly, it will display public posts and comments from users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries, and Turkey as search results. And secondly it will take data from Facebook to augment its search result rankings.
A blog post by Yandex explains that it has been granted full access to a “firehose” of Facebook’s public data. Which means it will also be displaying people and companies on Facebook as search results. This isn’t too different from how Google handles things, and opens up a more complete set of results for Russian users.
[source: Ars Technica]
