In the iOS 7 demo, it was revealed that Siri has some new features, and among them are Bing web search results, not to mention Twitter search and Wikipedia content. In addition to potentially making Bing more of a factor in users’ search habits, the features also help Apple better compete with Google’s (and Android’s) conversational search and Knowledge Graph.

But that’s not all that Apple has done with search. While the company didn’t exactly announce it, it has also made Russian search engine Yandex available as an option in Safari in both iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks. This is the case in Russia, Ukraine and Turkey, where that search engine already has a substantial user base.

Now, Apple hasn’t gone so far as to make Yandex the default search in these countries, at least not in the beta that developers have gotten their hands on.

This signals that Apple isn’t ready to completely abandon Google just yet, despite the increasingly rocky relationship between the two companies. If you’ll recall, Apple recently dropped Google Maps for its own Maps product, and some have speculated that it’s only a matter of time before Google is no longer the default search on Apple products.

That could still happen, and we could just be in the early stages of Apple phasing it out. TechCrunch reported earlier this year, however, that Google could pay Apple $1 billion next year to remain the default search engine on iOS. How much would Microsoft pay? Or Yandex?

[via GigaOm]

Yandex says Islands will speed up the engagement with sites and services by allowing users to take action on their queries from the results pages. Users could, for example, buy movie tickets, make reservations at restaurants, or pay bills directly from the search page.

“Apps have changed people’s expectations of usability, especially on mobile,” said Ilya Segalovich, CTO at Yandex. “When people search on the rich web these days, they are often looking to carry out an action. What happens now is that even if you can see in search results a link to the website where you can potentially book your movie ticket or pay your bill, you still need to click through to this site and possibly even browse a few pages before you find the booking form. We’re speeding up this process.”

“Interactive snippets deliver a new level of user experience,” Segalovich adds. “Sitelinks are an outdated way of providing information and rich snippets are mere decoration. We know users want faster, more direct engagement with services, and interactive snippets mean businesses can better serve the needs of their customers by offering a shortcut to the ultimate search.”

The company is careful to note that it will not determine when to show Islands itself. It does relinquish some control to the webmasters providing such services. Webmasters will also be able to determine what their Islands will look like, at least to some extent.

The feature will be available to all users on different types of devices, but will first launch for desktop computers and tablets before launching for mobile devices. It’s being rolled out in Turkey today, then will be launched in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in the coming months.

More on Islands here.

“We all know what it takes to understand another person,” the company says. “It’s a lot. Even if all you need to understand is what a person is looking for online. We have been trying to do this for years. A person’s interests and preferences give a good clue as to what they want to find. We used to look into a user’s search history as far as a few months back to choose for them the search results that would be most relevant to their scope of interests.”

“Updating our knowledge of users’ interests once a day allows us to understand their more-or-less stable interests, such as a love of books or football, or that they speak Russian and live in Saint Petersburg,” says Yandex. “More than half of all searches on Yandex, however, are about something that interests the searcher at the very moment of searching and stops interest them the moment after. To be able to cater to such momentary searches, we now analyse search sessions in real time.”

The company notes that the change helps it deliver more relevant results to users who don’t actually have another search history on the search engine.

Yandex’s real-time processing system processes over 10 terabytes of data per day.

More on the changes here.

The page is less cluttered than previous versions (you can see them all here), and has less text. They’ve replaced images with blocks of text, and placed related items together. News from big media outlets, for example, are now placed with news from blogs.

“We have moved the most popular services to a more visible position and our specialist services went to the background – for example, Yandex.Mail is now in a more prominent spot, while Yandex.Direct and Yandex.Metrica have moved down to the bottom of the page,” the company explains. “The Yandex.Maps feature has been expanded, so that users can now find the nearest pharmacy or cafe with one click, along with taxis, public transport routes and panoramas. As a result, the homepage is both simpler and more functional.”

According to Yandex, the new page is up to 50% faster than the previous one.

“Yandex is both a search engine and the gateway to the internet for millions of people,” said Vera Leyzerovich, head of desktop and mobile products at Yandex. “On the homepage, besides the search bar, users are accustomed to seeing information that they need every day – news, weather, exchange rates, the traffic situation. But the more data it includes, the harder it is to navigate. On the new version, we have retained the emphasis on search and kept the page informative and familiar for its users, but at the same time we have made it clear and uncluttered, so people will enjoy visiting it again and again.”

A report came out earlier this year that Yandex had surpassed Bing in search queries.

“Yandex.Store is a global product and it is already available in eight languages for users around the world,” said Alexander Zverev, Head of Yandex.Store. “We welcome app developers to publish their apps to Yandex.Store and look forward to working with device manufacturers from around the world who wish to install Yandex.Store on their devices. The global market for Android-based mobile phones is very fragmented. There are only a few major players who enjoy a meaningful share, with the remaining portion of the market distributed among hundreds of smaller companies. We are joining the game to contribute to competition that ensures freedom of choice for the end user and other members of the market.”

Payments in the store go through Yandex’s Yandex.money service, and all of the apps are verified by Kaspersky Lab.

“The Android app stores are a magnet for malware developers. The platform’s popularity and the fact that its source code is publicly available made Android a popular target for malicious attacks – 99% of all malware detected on mobile devices in 2012 were aimed at Android smartphones,” says Petr Merkulov, Director of Products and Services Development, Kaspersky Lab. “We provide comprehensive anti-virus protection for Yandex.Store by integrating our special Kaspersky Anti-Virus SDK.”

Device manufacturers can integrate Yandex’s app store into their devices and get a share of the revenues.

“In many countries it’s possible to pay for practically anything with a bankcard, and in Russia it’s gradually becoming the norm as well, especially in big cities,” said Lev Volozh, head of the Yandex.Taxi service. “People enjoy the convenience of using bankcards to make payments in shops, restaurants and at the cinema ¬– but in Moscow there are still very few taxis equipped to take bankcards. With the help of our service, people can pay for their taxi ride whichever way suits them best – by cash or by card.”

“Thanks to the new service’s integration with Yandex.Money, users can be confident that their transaction will be fast and secure: they can pay by card without actually handing their card to the driver or disclosing their card details to the taxi company,” Yandex says in its announcement. “Yandex.Money has been working with bankcards for a long time and has a strong track record, having processed millions of transactions, including payments to many transportation providers. Yandex.Money can already be used to buy plane, train and intercity bus tickets.”

The service, for now, is only available in Moscow, but the company says it will soon launch in other cities and on other mobile platforms. It will also come to taxi.yandex.ru.

Yandex reported fourth-quarter earnings this week, missing estimates for profits. The company leads in Google in search market share in Russia, with over 60% of the market.

Earlier this month, numbers from comScore showed that Yandex is actually leading Bing worldwide in terms of search queries.

Search Engine Watch’s Michael Bonfils says Microsoft sites processed 4.477 billion queries while Yandex processed 4.844 billion in November and December. That would make Microsoft (and Bing) number five. The top three are Google, Baidu and Yahoo.

Last month, Yandex seemed poised to make a mark here in the U.S. (or at least attempt it), but the company’s plans were spoiled by Facebook. Yandex launched an app called Wonder, which was a new take on social search and relied heavily on Facebook data. Facebook deemed it a competitor (particularly since it had just launched its own social search offering in Graph Search), and cut the app off. It’s against Facebook’s terms to use Facebook’s data in a competing service.

Facebook’s Graph Search could, however, actually help Bing if it gains traction. Bing provides the web results, which are the default when Facebook doesn’t have the appropriate data for a query. Graph Search is still in early beta, and is still slowly rolling out to users.

As previously reported, Facebook had blocked its data from the app on grounds that it was a competing service, and the companies were said to be talking things out. Apparently the talks have resulted in Facebook standing its ground, as TechCrunch reports that Yandex has pulled the app from the App Store, and shares a statement from the company:

“Wonder’s functioning, in its current state, as well as the quality of user experience it provides, largely depends on the access to Facebook’s Graph API. Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being. We will be considering partnership opportunities with other social networks and services to offer our users a richer internet experience via Wonder.”

Wonder isn’t the only app that has been experiencing friction from Facebook, as Voxer and Twitter’s Vine have also had their troubles.

Facebook addressed developers in a blog post last week, essentially saying that most of them can continue doing what they normally do, and re-emphasizing its terms about competing services and services that offer little value back to Facebook. These are the kinds of apps Facebook doesn’t want to play nice with.

Facebook issued a response to concerns about its Platform today in a post on its Developers Blog. Facebook’s Justin Osofsky writes:

For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you’re doing. Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they’re doing in your apps with people on Facebook. This is how our platform has been used by the most popular categories of apps, such as games, music, fitness, news and general lifestyle apps.

For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today (see I.10).

We are committed to helping you build great apps with Facebook, and will continue to invest in products that help you succeed while creating a healthy ecosystem.

So, don’t do things that Facebook already does, or piggyback off Facebook’s data in a way that does little to help Facebook users is pretty much the message they’re sending. In a statement to TechCrunch, Yandex already explained why it felt it wasn’t violating Facebook’s policies, before Facebook even pulled the data, but clearly that didn’t help. The companies, according to that publication, are talking about how to proceed.

In fact, Facebook has been putting the kibosh on a number of apps it sees as potential competitors when it comes to API access, as Josh Constine at TechCrunch reports, citing Twitter’s new Vine video app and Voxer as other casualties, as both were cut off from Facebook’s Find Friends API, which lets apps give users access to their Facebook friends.

Facebook’s Platform policy says, “Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.”

It also says, “You must not include data obtained from us in any search engine or directory without our written permission.” Constine shares a statement it receive from Yandex before Facebook even blocked its access:

We note that Yandex is not in violation of Facebook Platform Policies providing for restriction to use data obtained from Facebook in a search engine or directory for the reason that Wonder is not a search engine or a directory. Our application is a personal assistant that helps browse and organize information that is exclusively available to and associated with relevant account of the relevant user in various social networks and services.

On the contrary, [a] search engine is conventionally understood as an information location tool which automatically indexes tens of thousands of publicly available websites, fetches information with unrestricted access and is freely accessible to any Internet user. In addition, we would like to note that Wonder requests [a] user for specific permission to access each portion of information available to the user through a social network or services and never accesses information or data which is beyond the consent, availability for or extent of permission expressly granted by the application user. It is further to be noted, that the application does not perform any automated operations, unless these are specifically permitted by the user.

Clearly, Yandex saw this as a potential problem, and launched anyway, but based on the nature of the app, and how it is coinciding with the roll-out of Facebook’s own Graph Search, it’s no surprise that Facebook would view it as a competitor.

The companies are reportedly in talks about how to proceed with the app, but if Facebook doesn’t budge, it’s not going to make Wonder nearly as attractive to users as it may have been otherwise (and the jury was still out on that anyway). Apparently, Wonder can still operate with the other aforementioned networks’ data (for now), and that even includes Facebook’s Instagram. The real social data, as we all know, however, is in Facebook itself.