Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/01/14/facebook_yandex_deal/
Facebook lets Russian search czar Yandex suck on its public 'firehose'
Time to double check your privacy settings, comrades
Posted in Networks, 14th January 2014 23:42 GMT
Folks without a firm grip on their Facebook privacy settings will now have their posts on the social network added to Russia's biggest search engine Yandex.
"Facebook has granted us full access to its 'firehose' of public data," said the Russian firm in a statement.
"This means that now, not only can Yandex search for people and company pages on Facebook, it can also search for content marked 'Public' from users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey. Of course, anything users mark as 'Private' will remain off-limits."
Yandex may not be well known outside of Russia, but it's the biggest search engine in the country – outpacing Google by a hefty margin. Yandex has also inked similar deals with Twitter, Live Journal, and the Russian social network Vkontakte - which is second only to Facebook in the country.
"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. We want to provide users with the possibility to receive answers that take into account the information that can be gathered from these resources," said Yandex.
The Russian search engine didn't detail if it paid Facebook for the data, but reportedly no cash exchanged hands. The deal will see more traffic driven to Facebook, and add valuable content to Yandex's results.
Facebook has a similar deal for adding posted information to search results with Microsoft's Bing search engine, but not with Google. Based on this latest move maybe Zuckerberg and Co is looking to Baidu as a next step in global domination. ®