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 […]

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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:

Bing Emoji lookup

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:

Bing emoji

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

bing emoji

bing emoji

Searching for burger and fries also worked:

bing emoji

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

yahoo 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:

New_Tab

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.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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