Yandex Taps Twitter Firehose for Real-Time Search

Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), also known as the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) of Russia, has struck a deal with Twitter to license the microblog’s full firehose feed of public tweets for its blog search engine.

Financial terms of the deal, announced Feb. 21, were not disclosed.

Twitter posts of users who tweet in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, as well as top feeds in other languages, will be included in Yandex’s blog search results.

Also, users who search for information on Twitter will find the same results via twitter.yandex.ru. Users can search by user name or by hashtag.

With somewhere between 60 and 65 percent of the Russian search market, Yandex is easily the leading search engine in that country, mirroring Google’s influence and reach in the U.S. Yandex, which went public last year, also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey.

Yandex’ deal with Twitter, which should boost the search engine’s traffic and profile in Russia, recalls the firehose deals Twitter struck with Google and Microsoft a couple years ago.

Microsoft has retained its deal with the microblog, which sees over 250 million tweets broadcast on its platform each day. Google and Twitter could not come to terms on a new deal last July, leaving Google without a real-time search product.

For Yandex, the deal with Twitter is part of Yandex’s play to focus on social search, which the company will use to better differentiate itself from Google, which has 25 percent of the Russian search market.

Yandex today rolled out a beta version of a people finder, which lets Web users in Russia see all public profiles of a person with accounts on social networks and blogs, such as VKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal and Odnoklassniki.

Yandex€™s index has about 250 million personal profile pages hosted on various blogging platforms and social networks.

Google offers its own social search effort, dubbed “Search, plus your world.” This service integrates with the company’s Google+ social network to inject relevant posts and photos into users’ search results.

However, it chose not to include results from Facebook or Twitter. Twitter and Google also recently tussled in the media over Search, plus your world, with Twitter crying foul over being left out of Google’s social search indexing