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  • Yandex, Google’s Russian Rival, Is Twitter’s New Real-Time Search Partner

    Ingrid Lunden

    Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... → Learn More

    Monday, February 20th, 2012
    yandex

    A significant step for Twitter in its international growth: Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results.

    The news also underscores one possible route to revenue generation for Twitter: Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30 million for a similar search agreement.

    The agreement with Yandex will see Twitter’s data firehose appear both in Yandex’s blog search, as well as through a dedicated URL, twitter.yandex.ru.

    The Yandex agreement is similar to the real-time Twitter search that used to be offered by Google — a partnership that ended last year around the time that Google was launching its own Google+ service.

    Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets,” covering all languages — but seems to highlight specifically those tweets that are in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, covering tweets from more than two million users. People will be able to search by usernames and hashtags, too. In total, Twitter has around 100 million active users, covering some 250 million tweets per day.

    This looks like Twitter’s first big deal with a Russian portal, and could point to more local partnerships of its kind — useful for Twitter extending its coverage and usefulness beyond its home market and English.

    For Yandex, the Twitter deal gives the search giant — which currently has around 60 percent of the market in Russia — a leg up in its own strategy to do more in social networking: Yandex already offers people Google-like features to share news and other content and this will enhance that.


    Company: Yandex
    Website: yandex.ru
    Launch Date: September 23, 1997
    IPO: NASDAQ:YNDX

    Yandex is an internet technologies company that operates in Russia, CIS and Turkey. It is the largest Russian and fourth-largest world internet search engine. Yandex is an acronym for the phrase Yet Another Indexer. As of March 2013, Yandex had about 61% of the Russian search market (source: LiveInternet.ru). Yandex’s mission is to give the answer to the user anytime and anywhere. Company provides its services for desktop and mobile users and develops embedded solutions as well. The company specializes on highly-targeted...

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    Product: Google+
    Website: plus.google.com
    Company Google

    A Google project headed by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, Google+ is designed to be the social extension of Google. Its features focus on making online sharing easy for users. “Circles,” think social circles, akin to Facebook’s lists. “Sandbar,” a user-unifying toolbar. “Sparks,” a search engine for sharing content between users. “Messenger,” a group messaging app that allows users to share with certain “Circles.” “Hangouts,” group video chatting designed to allow up to 10 users video chat at once. Each Google+ user can replace his...

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