Facebook to share data with Russia's Yandex

Facebook is looking sustain its high growth rate amid increasing competition

Facebook has agreed a deal to share public data from its users with Yandex - Russia's largest search engine.

The deal will give Yandex full access to public data from users in Russia, Turkey and CIS countries including Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

The data includes users' posts and comments on them. Profiles or posts set to "private" will not be searchable.

The move is expected to help Yandex improve search results and boost traffic on Facebook in Russia.

"In the near future, Yandex's search results will display not only Facebook users' posts but also others' comments on them," Yandex said in a statement.

"Users can find out what those on the social network are saying about the current headline news events, for example, or the latest movies."

'Better representation'

Facebook, the world's biggest social networking site, trails domestic players in the Russian market.

The firm has been making a push to boost its presence in emerging markets as it looks to sustain the high level of user growth amid growing competition.

Yandex, which is the leading search engine in Russia, said that it would take into consideration the popularity of things on Facebook while ranking search results.

It said that getting full access to the social network's public data meant that "Facebook will be better represented in Yandex's search results".

"We see one of our key tasks as being the creation of social search services, using content from all the popular social networks in equal measure.

"This would allow a user to find an old friend without having to register on every single social network one after another," it added.

Yandex did not disclose the value of the deal, but various reports indicated that it did not involve any cash.