Yandex strikes deal with Twitter for access to tweets

Popular Russian search engine Yandex has something Google doesn’t: The approbation of Twitter and access to the entire stream of public tweets.

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Yandex has signed an agreement with Twitter to license the full feed of public tweets, otherwise know as the Twitter “firehose,” and will begin including tweets in search engine results. The search engine, which dominates in Russia with 64 percent market share, announced the deal in a press release early Tuesday morning.

“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,” Twitter’s director of business development April Underwood said in a statement. “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.”

Twitter-infused search results will be incorporated into Yandex’s “Blog Search” tool. Alternatively, searchers can visit twitter.yandex.ru to specifically query for tweets.

“Tweets of over two million users are available for search on Yandex,” the Russian search company said. “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.”

The deal comes more than seven months after Google and Twitter failed to renegotiate an agreement that would keep tweets in Google’s realtime search product. Without Twitter data, Google was forced to dissolve Google Realtime Search. The search giant later turned to its fledging social network Google+ to develop a crafty workaround for incorporating realtime results.

In January, Google introduced Search Plus Your World, a controversial addition to the core search product that favors Google+ profiles and content over content from other social sites. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the update was not in the best interests of the searcher.

Terms of the Twitter-Yandex deal are unknown, but Yandex is likely paying a substantial fee for its access to the Twitter firehose. Previous reports estimated that Google and Microsoft (which licenses the firehose for search engine Bing) paid north of $20 million for their original deals with Twitter.

Russia, according to third-party analysis, has under 5 million Twitter accounts and ranks twentieth in terms of Twitter accounts when compared to other countries.

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