Yandex has announced a deal with Facebook, one that gives the Russian search giant gain direct access to public Facebook data.

Posts by Facebook users in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, other CIS countries, and Turkey will be available for indexing by Yandex as soon as it has been published.

Seeking to collaborate with major search engines, the full access to the “firehose” of data directly from Facebook only augments what Yandex has already been doing with data from Twitter, LiveJournal, and other social networks.

Facebook content from the aforementioned countries will pop up in Yandex’s Blogs search results, joining results from other blogs, microblogs and social networks.

“Yandex will use data from Facebook’s public firehose feed to improve the quality of its search results,” according to a Yandex spokesperson. Yandex plans to incorporate various content formats that have had “particular resonance” on Facebook.

“The popularity of materials on Facebook will be taken into consideration when ranking search results,” according to Yandex.

Yandex stressed that only content published to Facebook as “public” will be indexed. Anything marked as private won’t be indexed.

In the U.S., Bing is the only search engine that has access to Facebook data and have incorporated likes, shares and recommendations into search results since 2010. Google and Facebook had a parting of the ways around that same time, culminating with Google removing Facebook information from the built-in Android Contacts app.

Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. However there are mumblings that Yandex has free access to the data. Either way, the deal is quite interesting.

Last year, Yandex released a social search app called Wonder, designed to search public social media posts. Facebook complained and blocked Wonder, eventually leading to the complete shutdown of the social search.