Bing Now Lets You Search By Emoji

Want to search for something using popular emoji characters? Microsoft’s Bing search engine now supports this.

Bing announced the news in a post today, sharing some examples of why you might want to do this. For one, perhaps you want to know what exactly a particular emoji means. Enter that into the search box, and Bing will tell you:

More interesting is that you can combine emoji with words. Don’t want to type out “donut?” Use that character along with others to find the best local donut place. Or combine the bride character with the shower character to find bridal shower info:

I tested it out, and it worked well to do searches for “sun” or “full moon” using only those characters:

Searching for burger and fries also worked:

But ultimately, search by emoji seems likely more a novelty than a useful search feature. By the way, Yahoo also supports search by emoji:

Google does not, in my testing. This is despite the fact that people apparently are trying to search with emoji on Google, given that if you enter an emoji, Google sometimes shows related searches:

Google only shows related searches that people are actually doing. This means people are trying emoji-related searches on Google and not getting answers. Maybe Bing will attract a few dissatisfied Google searchers this way.