Google Wants You to Tweet Emojis at Them. Here’s Why

With mobile technology more accessible than ever, Google has become the go-to search engine for those in need of quick answers. Now, Google is making it even easier for a user to describe what they want by increasing its usability with Twitter and the little images known as emojis.

Before there was the written word, humanity relied on pictures to communicate. When someone first utilized a colon and a closed parenthesis to send a digital smile, that tendency reignited in the emoticon, which ultimately spawned the icons known as emojis. While many might disregard emojis as silly, trivial, or unprofessional, Google has seen the value in the little images to simplify searches and bypass language barriers.

In May of 2016, Google enabled users to perform a search from their mobile device using emojis by tweaking their algorithm to search based on what the image represents. Instead of returning a “no results found” message if a user input an emoji, Google now knew to return results related to whatever emoji was searched for. More recently, Google augmented its search abilities to also accept queries from a different avenue.

Now, if a user were to tweet one of a selection of emojis to Google’s Twitter account, the search engine will respond with a link to a search results page. This page will be a “nearby” search for whatever emoji was tweeted.

Of course, location services must be turned on in order for this new feature to work.

While Google has remained mum on which 200 out of 1,400 unicode symbols will return results in this way, it shouldn’t be long before more are public knowledge than the ones Google elected to use as examples. In the meantime, you can be sure that you can at least find a burger joint, wherever your business travels take you.

Which emoji would you find the most useful to tweet? Let us know in the comments below!