Earlier this week Russian search giant Yandex announced that Facebook has granted it full access to its “firehose” of public data. Thus not only can Yandex search for people and company pages on Facebook, it can also search for content marked “Public” from users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey.
At present, Facebook posts from users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan appear in search results only in the Blogs part of Yandex Search. Soon they will be added to the service’s main Search page, providing fresher answers to user queries.
Yandex will add up-to-date articles and videos among other things that are popular among Facebook users. The popularity of the materials in the social network will be taken into account for search result ranking.
As social networks have become a part of our daily lives, “the intensity of a discussion on any subject in social media is proof of the topic’s relevance or ‘hotness.’ A search engine has to take this into consideration,” Yandex explained on its corporate blog.
“We don’t compete with [any] social network; instead we seek to collaborate with all players,” the Russian search company underscored. “One of our key tasks is to create social search services using content from all the popular social networks in equal measure.”
Twitter posts have been made available to Yandex users since early 2012. The Russian search company also indexes status updates in LiveJournal, Vkontakte and other social media.
However, Yandex’s attempts to integrate social media information into its search results have not always been successful. In January of last year, the Russian company launched Wonder, a voice-activated search application that retrieved and displayed relevant data from Facebook or other social network content. However, the application was withdrawn just days after launch, following Facebook’s decision to block it – apparently due to certain similarities with Facebook’s own Graph Search service.
