OREANDA-NEWS. December 02, 2010.  Yandex becomes the first search engine to develop a partnership with the most popular Russian social network VKontakte. The networking website now pushes public information in its users’ profiles to the search engine’s index in real time. This information is now available on yandex.ru or on Yandex’s blog search.

Currently, Yandex indexes over 25 million user profiles, and counting, on VKontakte. A user’s profile may turn out a useful search result for someone looking for a person online. To respond to search queries such as this, Yandex provides a link to a person’s VKontakte profile together with additional information. Depending on what user details are accessible to other people, Yandex search users will see a person’s date of birth, place of birth, university or place of work. In addition, Yandex’s face recognition technology picks the relevant fragment in the user’s profile photo and turns it into an easily recognizable thumbnail image to display in the search results.

All public posts on VKontakte’s own blogging and microblogging services now get indexed almost instantly by Yandex’s blog search engine. The daily number of new posts on VKontakte’s microblogging service is almost three times the number of new Russian posts on Twitter.

“To be able to exchange vast amounts of data instantly, our teams had to come up with solutions to challenging engineering problems,” says Andrey Rogozov, head of development at VKontakte. “Currently, we submit to the largest Russian search engine over a million notes and posts daily, and now that VKontakte has launched a microblogging service the amount of data we give over to Yandex will grow dramatically”.

“For many web users in Russia, VKontakte has become a permanent place of online residence,” says Roman Ivanov, head of Communication Services at Yandex. “We are glad that Yandex can now help web uses get back in touch with their friends or someone they know and stay in contact with them”.