Earlier this year, Google decided to send a waving emoji to the emoji, removing the omnipresent symbols from its desktop search results.
According to Search Engine Land, Google announced that it would drop emojis from its search results in a move to clean up its pages and improve user experience.
Google webmaster John Mueller explained that websites wouldn’t be penalized in the search engine rankings for adding emojis to their pages; the emojis simply won’t be displayed in the search results. He said using emojis “is kind of a waste of time,” since “soon they will not be shown at all.”
By essentially preventing the search engine results from being overrun with these tiny cartoons, many people assumed this would be the death of the emoji (insert skull emoji here). On one hand, it makes sense — sifting through search engine results peppered with tiny cartoon images is likely a hassle for many users. However, with more than 100 billion search engine inquiries made each month across the planet, it’s hard to imagine everyone being happy about Google’s big change.
But fear not — if your love for the emoji can’t be denied, a new desktop search engine will allow you to make web searches with emojis — and see emojis in the search results themselves.
According to LifeHacker.com, Mojibar, designed for Mac OS X, is a menubar designed for fluid, simple emoji searches. The app lets users quickly search through Apple’s emojis and incorporate them into the search text with unicode or the emoji code. Best of all? The app is completely free.
And mobile web users have no reason to worry. Currently, Google has no plans to eliminate emojis from showing up in its mobile search results. That’s something to make everyone want to type out a few smiley emojis.