Yandex and Twitter: New Best Friends

February 21, 2012

We have been monitoring and using Yandex for a while. For some queries, Yandex is more useful than Google. The service returns results in English from www.yandex.com and in Russian from www.yandex.ru. Yandex recently invested in Blekko, a useful semantic Web search system. Yandex also enhanced its mapping functions, moved toward advertising, and enhanced the performance of its system. In short, Yandex is in a good position to launch a full scale attack on Google. A search engine which returns relevant results quickly and without the privacy, legal, and clever machinations which seem to be part of Google’s modus operandi, what’s not to like.

We learned from Reuters, a unit of the troubled Thomson Reuters’ operation, that Twitter and Yandex are now new BFFs. Navigate to “Twitter Partners with Yandex for Real-Time Search.” The news report is classic “real” journalism. The bottom line is:

Yandex have agreed a partnership that will allow Yandex to show new tweets in its search results almost instantly, as Twitter becomes an increasingly important source of real-time information.

Google seems to be losing traction with Twitter. Google is pressuring Yandex in Russia, so Yandex is likely to take action. Is Yandex the new Google? Not yet. But Google is likely to find some of the Russian wizards at Yandex as adept at math as Google’s brainiacs. In the Russian market, Google may face some bureaucratic challenges. In the US market, Google may find that its policy of going in many directions, throwing out alpha versions of products, getting caught being clever in its interpretation of privacy settings in Safari may give some users a reason to check out Blekko and Yandex.

Relevance matters to those who are looking for information. Yandex warrants a test drive. We are monitoring this new battle in the world of key word search. For now Google can only watch the new best friends hang out at an Internet cafe, billing and cooing to one another.

Stephen E Arnold, February 21, 2012

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.