Russian search engine giant Yandex has announced a partnership with Facebook to include contents from some of the social networking site's users in its search results.
Yandex, often referred to as the Google of Eastern Europe will serve visitors related, real time public posts from Facebook users along side the general search results. It will get full access to public data from Facebook users residing in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey. Apart from users' public posts, the search results will also include comments from other users on that post.
In Russia, Yandex has a market share of more than 60 percent, leading the world's biggest search engine Google.
In a blog post, Yandex wrote that the goal of the partnership is to promote "hot topics" that are trending on Facebook.
"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," said a Yandex spokeperson.
Yandex stressed that it will allow search for people and company pages on Facebook with contents only marked "public" while private informations will remain off-limits.
With this partnership, Yandex becomes the world's second search engine, after Bing, that will use Facebook in its results.
The deal, by far is being considered non-commercial and based on mutual benefit. Yandex will be eyeing for an improvement in its search results while Facebook getting more traffic. In Russia, Facebook is ranked an estimated fourth most popular site.
In an oversubscribed initial public offering in New York in May 2011, Yandex raised $1.4 billion and was priced $25 per share. Since then the stocks of the company has risen by around 70 percent as Yandex continues to grow its presence in Europe's largest internet market by audience, Russia.
Last year, Yandex and Facebook were in news for blocking Yandex's social search app - Wonder, which subsequently was shut down.
