Yandex said Tuesday that it had signed an agreement with global microblogging service Twitter that will give users of the country's most popular search engine immediate access to as many as 250 million new tweets that are posted daily.
Twitter will license "the full feed of all public tweets" — the so-called "firehose" of data — to the search engine, with new tweets becoming available in search results "in a matter of moments," Yandex said in a statement.
The agreement will make the posts of the more than 2 million users who tweet in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Kazakh available to Yandex users, as well as the most popular feeds in other languages.
The search can be conducted via Yandex's Blog Search or a new website, Twitter.yandex.ru.
"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," April Underwood, Twitter's business development director said in the statement.
The agreement is beneficial for both sides, said Anna Lepetukhina, an analyst at Troika Dialog.
The partnership is likely to result in greater brand recognition for Twitter and could help it attract more users.
"It's sort of a marketing trick for Twitter," Lepetukhina said by telephone. "Yandex has many users in the regions that are not aware of Twitter."
Twitter currently has more than 100 million active users across the world.
Lepetukhina said the deal would allow Yandex to enhance its search capabilities because it will increase the number of pages it tracks.
This is crucial in light of the growing number of users who want to get search results from social media as well as websites.
Combined with other initiatives by Yandex to improve its search mechanisms, the move is likely to result in the company strengthening its position in Russia and getting a competitive advantage, Lepetukhina said.
Google didn't renew a similar agreement with Twitter after it expired in July. The company declined to comment on whether it plans to renew the agreement when contacted Tuesday.
New York-listed Yandex has market share of about 60 percent in Russia, compared with Google's 25.9 percent, according to LiveInternet.ru, a market research portal.
Yandex also launched a new tool Monday designed to search social networks. It will allow users to quickly find people by their profiles.
"We are currently concentrating on social-networking searches," said Anton Pavlov, a blog search manager at Yandex. "The partnership with Twitter reinforces our efforts in this area," he said.
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