Yandex Announces Access To Facebook's "Firehose"

(RTTNews) - Russian search giant Yandex (YNDX) announced a partnership agreement with Social network Facebook Inc. (FB), giving Yandex full access to the social network's "firehose" of public data. As of today, public content from Facebook users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries and Turkey will be available for indexing by Yandex as soon as it has been published.

Yandex said it will use data from Facebook's public firehose feed to improve the quality of its search results. Where appropriate, Yandex's search results will incorporate articles and videos that have had particular resonance on the social network. The popularity of materials on Facebook will be taken into consideration when ranking search results.

Yandex noted that the agreement only covers data from Facebook users in the above countries, published under "Public" privacy settings. Users can find out what those on the social network are saying about the latest headline news events, for example, or the latest movies. In the near future, Yandex's search results will display not only Facebook users' posts but also others' comments on them. Profiles and posts that Facebook users mark "Private" will not be searchable.