We may have finally gotten a taco emoji as well as 36 other new symbols with the Unicode 8.0 update released last week, but that major victory has been followed by a bit of a setback for emoji lovers everywhere.
Google has apparently removed emojis from its search results on desktop and mobile, according to The SEM Post. The change took place over the weekend, although the company hinted back in May that emojis would eventually no longer appear in search results.
Expedia had included emojis in the titles of some of its search results, but they are no longer turning up, according to The SEM Post. By including emojis in search results, companies like Expedia might have hoped that they would help make their results more eye-catching on Google, thus achieving a higher click-through rate, according to Search Engine Land. However, Google seems to have put a stop to any hopes of that with this change.
This doesn't mean that pages that use emojis will be demoted in Google's search results; it just means that the emojis themselves won't appear in titles in search results, according to The Next Web. However, emojis seem to have remained in URLs, as The SEM Post points out and as this screenshot of a special promotion by Norwegian Air Shuttle shows.
It also looks like you can still somewhat use emojis to actually search the web. Though a sole pizza emoji doesn't turn up any results in Google, adding the word "hut" to the phrase does turn up some results for the chain restaurant Pizza Hut.
If you want to actually order pizza by using emoji, you can do so through Domino's Pizza. And if you really, really, really miss having emojis turn up in your search results, you can still see them and use them in all their colorful glory through Bing.
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