Saturday, January 26, 2013

Facebook Blocks Yandex, Russia biggest search engine

Facebook Blocks Yandex, Russia biggest search engine

Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, said its new experimental application to search on social networking sites from mobile devices was blocked by Facebook.

Yandex’s new mobile recommendation tool "Wonder App" was supposed to coalesce a user’s data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram and use the data to help answer questions asked verbally, similar to the Siri feature on Apple’s iPhone. Instead, Yandex is now in a dispute with Facebook, TechCrunch reports, with the two sides at odds over whether Wonder is properly defined as a search engine and thus in violation of rules governing the use of data provided by Facebook through its software interfaces, or APIs. In the meantime, Facebook has cut off Yandex’s API access, rendering Wonder significantly less viable.

The Facebook’s Yandex blockade is the latest in a series of information embargoes between competing internet giants. Facebook’s Instagram recently blocked users from showing their pictures on the microblogging network Twitter. Twitter, in turn, has been steadily tightening the restrictions on apps that use its own APIs. And Google recently allowed its own photo app Snapseed to publish into its social network Google+ while rivals like Instagram remain entirely locked out.

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