The team behind Bing has announced that if you want to search using emjois, you can now do so. The update, which is live for English markets, lets you search using the alternative input method.
For some, especially the younger crowd, emojis are a way of communicating and Bing wants to let you search with these emotional icons. The team states on their blog:
As you likely know, emoji are small pictures used to express an idea or emotion. With the explosion of mobile devices and the ubiquity of texting, it has become a shorthand language used by billions of us around the world. At Bing we want you to be able to search the same way you communicate every day.
You can see in the images at the top of this post how the search works by converting the image into its textual base to perform the query. The search does not appear to pull back results for posts that contain that emoji.
While this is likely a novelty for most users, it is one more way that Bing is looking to move beyond the traditional input methods for search.
Source: Microsoft