October 28, 2010. Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, and Facebook have signed a partnership agreement whereby Yandex will integrate information from the social network on its website.

Yandex makes its services more attractive for the users of social networks, including those with a Facebook account. So, the portal’s front page hosts a Facebook widget and the company’s own instant messaging service Ya.Online informs its users of new notifications on the networking website. In addition, Yandex will now add the data from Facebook into its blog search index improving its international search and boosting new, recently created pages’ indexing. Specifically, Facebook will provide Yandex with a syndication feed that gathers information about updates on its Pages and profiles created to represent public figures, businesses or organisations.

Yandex has long been incorporating social content into its search by indexing pages of key Russian-language blog-hosting websites and micro-blogging services, including LiveJournal.com, Twitter.com and LiveInternet.ru so that Yandex web search nowadays highlights user profiles hosted on most social networks. Yandex search can offer to its users the freshest and the most comprehensive social content from the above mentioned social networks and blog-hosting websites that partner with the company to have their data automatically added to the search engine’s index.

“Social networks are becoming more open to the outside world and it’s a win-win situation for everyone,’ says Roman Ivanov, Head of Communication Services at Yandex. ‘Social networking web-sites get more traffic and new users, and search engines obtain a whole load of information that boosts the search quality. We anticipate user interest in social and personal search to keep growing”.

“We feel that this partnership will bring a lot of value for our Russian users as we would like the public information on Facebook to be easily searchable via Yandex,” adds Javier Olivan, Head of International at Facebook.

About Facebook
Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.