Users in Russia can now search Twitter in real-time, thanks to a deal between the microblogging site and Russian search leader Yandex.

Yandex is the search engine of choice for the majority of Russian internet users, with Google still trailing, and now its dedicated ‘Blogs’ search engine will allow users to see the latest tweets on any subject in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh.

The length and value of the contract between Twitter and Yandex is unknown, though the Russian company’s Blog Search manager Anton Pavlov stated that Yandex is “currently concentrating on social networking search,” continuing that the “partnership with Twitter reinforces [Yandex’s] effort in this area,” suggesting the partnership could be considered long-term. After all, it is thought that there could be up to a million Russians currently using the microblogging site.

Twitter signed similar deals with Google and Microsoft’s Bing search engine in 2009; and though the Google partnership expired last July, the social media site is still thought to have made $20million from each of the agreements.

At last October’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter chief Dick Costolo detailed the difficulties in renewing the deal with Google, stating that the companies “just can’t agree on what the appropriate value exchange is. And I don’t just mean in terms of dollars…There are all sorts of details that we couldn’t come to grips with.”

When Twitter and Google first announced their deal – ironically at the same conference two years previously – it was thought that the search giant’s index was beginning to appear dated following the advent of real-time information, and it hoped the agreement would help to improve relevancy of search results.

The two companies clashed last month over the search engine’s algorithm changes which cause users to see more links to its own Google+ social network in its search results.

Google blogged that “you can find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about an amazing trip they just took, whether they’ve shared privately with you or publicly.

“Starting [10/01/2012] if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right hand side of the results page.”

Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s most senior lawyer, derided Google for “warping search” and claiming it was “a bad day for the internet”.