They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but an emoji is worth thousands of Google results.
You can now get answers from the search engine giant just by tweeting an emoji to Google, the company said Tuesday. A burger emoji will show you burger spots nearby, an umbrella emoji will tell you if it will rain where you are.
Of the 1,400 unicode symbols available, there are about 200 emojis that Google will respond to on Twitter, which the company wants users to test and discover on their own. Just in time for the holidays, the Christmas tree emoji shows results for where the nearest festive foliage is.
The emoji search rollout also includes some easter eggs. When you tweet the cow emoji, Google will respond with some moo-ving results. Some tweets, like the burger emoji, will come with a tailored GIF attached.
This new search form comes as Twitter continues to embrace the emoji, linking the modern hieroglyphic to certain hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #BB8. A study found that 600,000 tweets are sent an hour containing at least one emoji. The unicode symbols help deal with Twitter’s 140-character limit but also have developed meanings of their own. Just look at the fury over the peach emoji after it briefly stopped looking like a butt on iOS 10.2.
Google opened up to emoji searches in May, giving users results for the symbols instead of «no results found.»
You’ll need to have your location services enabled for Google’s emoji response to work through Twitter, since the replies are all localized based on where you are tweeting from.
I decided to try it out and tweet a peach emoji at Google … because I really like peaches. I got a very bootylicious response.
