Twitter Signs Deal with Russian Search Giant Yandex

Twitter’s director of business development, April Underwood, told Reuters: “We wanted to make sure that Twitter content can be where Twitter users are already going”. He then went on explaining: “Discovery through search is so important.”

Through this deal Yandex will gain full access to Twitter’s entire feed of public tweets and hence be able to display the newest tweets almost as soon as they are published by users. Additionally, according to TheNextWeb, Yandex will also add a dedicated Twitter search engine (which will be found at the twitter.yandex.ru address), where you’ll be able to view showcased messages posted in Belarusian, Ukranian, Kazakh and, of course, Russian. This section will also showcase some of the top tweets in a variety of languages, not necessarily the four mentioned above.

Yandex, the search engine which on many occasions received the title of the “Russian Google,” will also include a real-time Twitter search – a trait which Google used to have in the past, until it decided to shut down the service in July 2011  the agreement between the two (Twitter and Google) expired. Then, Google declared it will most probably opt for the restoring of the service as soon as it would have figured out how exactly to incorporate Google+ status updates.

Reuters asked Underwood questions about the potential future partnership with Google, to which he replied frankly: “anything’s possible, but there’s not really an update to provide there at this time.”

Neither of the two companies revealed the financial details of the new partnership, but rumors have it that Microsoft paid about $30 million for its deal with Twitter.