Twitter has made it official: it will do everything in its power to gain back some of the market share it lost in favor of Facebook and Google’s own social network. One of its first steps to become more visible is to get search engines to display tweets in results. Since Google hasn’t done that, Twitter found another giant to help on the matter. Thus, Twitter signed a deal with Yandex, the Russian search engine.
Until July last year, Twitter had a similar agreement with Google. But it seems that the deal expired and thus Twitter remained blocked from search engines. Meanwhile, Google+ is heavily enjoying the perks of the brother service Search Plus Your World which has been more than once accused of favoring Google.
Although Twitter protested against Google’s claim that they forgot to renew their own paid search agreement, the situation remained unchanged. So, almost half a year later, Twitter finally had a breakthrough in the matter. According to Twitter’s director of business development, April Underwood, the company “wanted to make sure that Twitter content can be where Twitter users are already going”. She also added that “discovery through search is so important”.
Basically, Yandex is allowed to access Twitter’s firehose of tweets in real time. Reuters writes that Yandex’s blog search manager Anton Pavolv said: “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.”
And Twitter sure has chosen its partner wisely. The social network already has Microsoft’s Bing partnered on a similar matter, but with Yandex Twitter scored a big gain in its competition with Google. Just leave the figures talk for themselves. In Russia, Yandex is the number one search engine in Russia, with a market share of 60 percent, while Google enjoys only a quarter.
However, Twitter’s alternative strategies aren’t exactly successful and it would be better off if it would just come to an agreement with Google. The deal with Yandex is just a temporary solution, but as Twitter’s chief executive said last October the two giants seem to have difficulties in coming to an agreement on “all sorts of details” not only “in terms of dollars”.
