Russian web giant Yandex has struck a deal with Facebook that will see it index publicly posted content on the social network that comes from the countries Yandex covers – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey.
This “firehose” deal is similar to that signed a few years back between Facebook and Microsoft, relating to the Bing search engine. Twitter also invites others to drink from its firehose, and Yandex has been a happy partner on that front since early 2012.
Yandex is often referred to as Russia’s answer to Google, and a blog post on Tuesday obliquely referred to a key difference between the two when it comes to partnerships:
“Here at Yandex, we’ve always said that our specialisation is information-search services, aggregation and the structuring of content. We don’t compete with anybody in the sphere of social networks; instead we seek to collaborate with all the players. We see one of our key tasks as being the creation of social search services, using content from all the popular social networks in equal measure. “
