Facebook posts will soon appear more prominently in Russian Internet giant Yandex’s search results

Russian Internet giant Yandex announced today that it has teamed up with Facebook to gain access to public content from the social network’s users in Russia and other Eastern European markets , as the company seeks to boost its search results with popular topics that are circulating on Facebook.

“The intensity of discussion on any subject in social media is proof of the topic’s relevance, or ‘hotness’ if you will. A search engine has to take this into consideration,” Yandex notes in its blog post.

Facebook has granted Yandex full access to its “firehose” of public data, which means Yandex can search for people and company pages on Facebook, as well as for content marked ‘public’ from users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey. It notes that anything users mark as ‘private’ will remain off-limits.

Currently, Facebook posts from users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan only show up under the Blogs part of Yandex Search. With the partnership, however, these will be added to its main Search page. Along with the targeted search results, Yandex will also display current articles and videos which have spread among Facebook users. When ranking its search results, the popularity of content on Facebook will also be considered.

Yandex is already working with Twitter in a similar way, and it indexes status updates in blogs including LiveJournal, as well as Russian social network VK, among others.