Facebook Partners With Russian Search Giant Yandex

Earlier this week, we took a look into the offices of Russian search engine giant Yandex. Today Yandex has announced a new partnership with Facebook in which Yandex will integrate information from the social network on the Yandex website. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the partnership announcement, “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.”

If you click the Facebook widget (seen below), it does request access to basically your entire Facebook account. This is different than the Like badges seen on many blogs and websites.

Javier Olivan, Head of International at Facebook, noted regarding the new partnership, “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.”