#900 - A note about how to search for emojis and other Unicode characters

Welcome to SearchResearch post #900!

Remarkably enough, we’ve somehow gotten from my first post on January 30, 2010 to this post, which is #900 in the series. First SRS post

In that very first post, I wrote:

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Saturday, January 30, 2010

About this blog–Why SearchReSearch?

I’ve been tempted for quite a while to create a blog. But I was finally pushed over the edge when i realized that there are too many good ideas about how-people-search, too many fascinating tales of mystery and woe that should be told, too many little morceaux that should be shared.
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That’s what this blog is about: What skills, tricks, tips, ideas (both small ideas and big IDEAs) should you know in order to be an effective searcher? Better yet, which of these combine to make you a great researcher?

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This sort of led inevitably to the SearchResearch Challenges that we all now enjoy each week.

The First SRS Challenge was pretty easy. I just asked:

“Who IS the Silicon Valley CEO (that Gladwell mentions in his story) who coaches girls’ basketball AND what company is he/she the CEO for?”

Not a bad start.

But this blog started up this long, long, long list of Challenges. Some have been simple and asked a single question that was intended to teach a particular search skill. Some have been really hard.. and a few still haven’t been answered yet. (I’m thinking about the Danish Optician Challenge from 2015.) Along the way we’ve talked about all kinds of things, from finding where the cameraman is standing, to discussions of center-pivot irrigation systems.

Each post is supposed to teach you a bit more about how to search, both the tactics and the strategies of searching. I hope I’ve managed to do that, and that you’ve been both entertained and enriched in the process.

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Today’s post isn’t another Challenge, but a note about how to search for emojis–or more generally, any Unicode character.

Here’s what I mean.

Just recently, this kind of emoji search started working on Google:

Yes, that’s right, you can now search for emojis or any character in the Unicode set. For instance, the white knight character, which will make it really easy to find chess match transcriptions…

Of course, you can copy/paste characters from many Unicode or Emoji character sites. (Such as the giant page of Unicode characters on Wikipedia. Or a shorter list at CopyPasteCharacters.)

Or, if you’re on a Mac, you can do the CMD+Control+Space shortcut to bring up the Emoji selector (shown below):