Yandex links up with Facebook

Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine and Facebook have signed a partnership agreement on which will see Yandex integrate information from the social network on its website.

Yandex and Facebook say they are making their social services more attractive and useful by providing complementary engines. The portal's users are able to get updated information and notifications from Facebook users by using Yandex instant messaging service Ya.Online

Additionally, Yandex will add data from Facebook into its blog search index improving its international search and boosting new, recently created page indexing. Facebook in turn will provide Yandex with a syndication feed that gathers information about updates on its pages, and profiles, created to represent public figures, businesses or organisations.

Yandex has long been incorporating social content into its search by indexing pages of key Russian-language blog-hosting websites and micro-blogging services, including LiveJournal.com, Twitter.com and LiveInternet.ru so that Yandex web search nowadays highlights user profiles hosted on most social networks.

Roman Ivanov, Head of Communication Services at Yandex said that network communication is gaining popularity among Russian users and the new cooperation agreement with Facebook will accelerate social integration.

“Social networks are becoming more open to the outside world and it’s a win-win situation for everyone. Social networking web-sites get more traffic and new users, and search engines obtain a whole load of information that boosts the search quality. We anticipate user interest in social and personal search to keep growing”.

Javier Olivan, Head of International at Facebook hailed the new partnership saying that the new service will boost Facebook’s popularity among Russian web users and make it easer to follow recent updates and public notifications.

“We feel that this partnership will bring a lot of value for our Russian users as we would like the public information on Facebook to be easily searchable via Yandex”