Emoji users are in for a treat as Microsoft’s own search engine Bing has just recently been updated and now recognises Emoji as valid search terms.
Emoji are essentially colourful mini pictures of Japanese origin that users can acquire by downloading from their smartphone’s respective app stores. Emoji range from multiple categories of interests such as emoticons, animals, food, horoscope symbols and even road signage. Recognising their popularity, Bing is now allowing users in the English market to replace text search terms with Emoji.
Users can key in Emoji and Bing will return relevant results based on the semantic meaning of the Emoji. The picture below shows running a Bing search with Emoji before the update and after the update:
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Besides that, Bing will also help define the meaning of an Emoji if the user is not entirely sure of their meaning and usage. As added novelty, users can also combine multiple Emoji and Bing will interpret them as multi-word searches.
Although conducting web searches with Emoji is a new idea in the market, it would seem that users would probably stick to searching with text terms instead as searching for the correct Emoji could prove to be too time consuming.
