A two-character search reveals just how little the search-engines understand their human users. A colon followed by parentheses is widely used to express emotions. Itās especially popular in short messages like a text message or Twitter post. One place it doesnāt seem to have gained much traction is in search queries. Not that the search-engines would have understood it anyway.
A search for āChina :( ā and āChina :) ā produces the same results in all major search engines. A human receiving these queries would probably have weighted results for the two quite differently. China and a smile could show you travel options and reviews, and China and a frown could show critiques of the countryās press and religious oppression. The emoticons are a strong indicator of user intent and interest thatās being ignored.
Advertising-wise, it could be beneficial to have this indication of a userās mood. It could be well-spent money to advertise a competing service to someone searching for a competitorās name followed by a frown.
The smile and frown character sequences look like something the search-engines should have special-cased a long time ago. Yet, none of them seem to be doing it. It doesnāt fit with their normal text string-driven search approach.
All modern operating systems support ideograms for everyday things. These are called āemojisā and their general meaning and names are specified in the Unicode Standard. For example, š represents a āhamburgerā. Bing and Google return no results if you just search for āšā or city-oriented results not filtered toward the food if you search for āš Londonā. Yandex is the only one of the bunch that finds webpages that contains the literal hamburger character. They donāt transliterate it into the word or meaning āhamburgerā. If the emoji is combined with an actual word, the emoji is ignored entirely by Yandex.
Bing announced support for emoji-capable search in October 2014, but seems to have since removed it.
A mapping between emojis and their names shouldnāt be too much to expect from the search engines. Emojis are especially useful on mobile were software keyboards have them one click away from their default letter keyboards. Searches for āāļøšā could be dumbly transliterated to āairplane high-speed trainā (literal character names), or even āairport express trainā (conceptual interpretation).
The only example Iāve found that uses transliteration is the local business directory Yelp. See it in action with a search for āš£ā (sushi.)