Russian internet company Yandex has released a beta version of its social networking search program, which will enable the company to upgrade its search engine by adding content from social networking websites.

As a result, Yandex’s Russian internet users will now be able to view the public profiles of those persons who have accounts on social networking and blogging websites, such as VKontakte, Facebook, LiveJournal and Odnoklassniki.

Yandex processes more than 2 million people searches per day. About 50 percent of these search queries are to find information about celebrities, while the other 50 percent inquire about a friend, a contact, an employee or a partner. In response to these queries, Yandex delivers links to personal profiles on social networking websites available for public access. Currently, Yandex's index has about 250 million personal profile pages hosted on different blogging platforms and social networking websites.

In case more than one personal profile matches the user's search query, Yandex adds one of the profiles to the top of its search results page and places all others on a separate page. The page also features search options such as age, location or workplace to refine search results. If multiple profiles exist for the same person, they are grouped together in the search results.

Additionally, Yandex's people search program allows internet users to view their online profiles the way other people see them and enable them to edit them or change their privacy settings on the website that hosts the profile.