Google now also allows you to search using emoji characters

You can now ? using Google to find your favorite emoji results. Whether you love ? or ? or you're on the healthy side and love ?, you can search for them on Google now.

Chat with SearchBot

google-emoji-1920

Back in October 2014, Bing enabled searching by emoji, but Google was unable to return any results when you used emoji characters. Now that has changed — You can now search on Google desktop or mobile using emoji characters.

Try it by searching for [?] or [?] or other characters, and Google will no longer show you that there are no results; instead, Google will show you results for the emoji character. Here are some screen shots:

google-apple-emoji-desktop

google-monkey-emoji-desktop

It also works on mobile, as you’d expect:

google-apple-emoji-result-1463522644

google-cow-emoji-result-1463522644

google-dog-emoji-result-1463522644

Again, the key difference between how Google handles emoji searches and how Bing does it is that Google shows you a result set for the emoji character with emoji results, and Bing just shows you for the character. So when you search for ? on Google, it shows you ? emoji results, but Bing shows you Apples, Apple.com and so on.

Hat tip to David Naylor for spotting this.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.