Finding interesting tweets about a trending topic is about to get a whole lot easier if you use Yandex to search on the Web.
Twitter has teamed up with the Russian search engine to show new and relevant tweets in its search results almost instantaneously.
As a source of real-time information, Twitter is an important community for keeping up-to-date with everything that’s happening in the world. It’s a fast way of sharing and disseminating information with a huge audience.
Yandex is being given access to all public tweets (Twitter’s “firehose”), just like Microsoft’s search engine Bing and Yahoo have.
“People share news, exchange opinions and discuss all sorts of matters in real-time all the time. This kind of information will help us enhance our search results,” Anton Pavlov, Yandex’s blog search manager, said in a statement.
Tweets in Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Kazakh, as well as top tweets in other languages, will be included in Yandex’s search results. Also, you’ll be able to find the same tweet search results at twitter.yandex.ru that you would on Twitter itself.
Yandex’s Twitter search corrects typos, and you can search by username or hashtag.
Twitter users by and large seemed happy with the ability to search tweets through Yandex.
Princeton computer science student Arman Suleimenov called the deal “awesome,” while Swapan Pradhan and Eric Roditi both thought it was “great.”
Google previously had a deal with Twitter to show tweets in real-time, but that expired last summer and was not renewed. The expiry of the deal meant that those looking for real-time tweets on a topic would have to do so through Twitter or another search engine it has partnered with.
When asked by Reuters if a new deal with Google was on the cards, April Underwood, Twitter’s director of business development, said, “Anything’s possible, but there’s not really an update to provide there at this time.”
It may be best not to hold your breath there. Twitter claimed last month that Google was burying Twitter search results below those for Google+. There are financial concerns too, of course.
If you prefer not to use Twitter’s awkward search function to find new tweets, you now have another option to avoid it. Just don’t expect to be able to Google real-time tweets any time soon.
Photo by jacobmar1ey
