Yandex releases mobile social search engine

Moscow—Russian Internet and search engine company Yandex has released Wonder, a social recommendation engine for U.S. users of Apple Inc.'s iPad and iPhone.

Wonder is a voice-and-text-activated app aimed at supporting U.S. Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter users. The app pulls answers to natural-language queries rather than keywords and uses speech recognition technology from Nuance Communications, whose software already powers Apple's Siri product.

The move builds on Yandex's announcement in October that it plans to expand internationally, and in particular to compete against Google Inc.