Russia’s biggest search engine, Yandex, is partnering with Twitter in a move that will significantly boost the site’s real-time search — and help it extend its lead locally over rivals including Google.
The deal gives Yandex access to Twitter’s firehose, and allows users to search it at twitter.yandex.ru, giving them almost instant access to vast troves of data streaming off the messaging service.
The move comes just hours after the Moscow-based service launched a program to incorporate more social networking data into its search results.
And it also comes after Google, which trails Yandex in the Russian market, famously ended its own deal with Twitter — a move that killed off its own real-time search product.
That decision was just one part of an ongoing spat between the two companies, but it appears that Yandex wants to try and take advantage of the situation to further extend its lead over Google in its home market. Currently Yandex is responsible for around 60 percent of Russian searches, but its rival recently stole a few points and moved up to control around a quarter of the market.
Although the terms of the deal aren’t known, it’s likely that Yandex is paying a substantial fee to access Twitter’s data: Microsoft is thought to pay around $ 30 million each year for the firehose.
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