... what are you going to do with it?

Today's Challenge is simple, and it requires you to be slightly clever.

Can you find interesting and useful cases when a search includes an emoji or a special Unicode character? Say WHY you find this use case interesting.

For instance, the "Live Long and Prosper" emoji (🖖) could be used to find Star Trek fan posts. Or, as I mentioned in yesterday's blogpost, the chess symbols (e.g.,

There are many useful tools for finding the emoji/extended-set characters that you'd like to use. In addition to the ones I showed yesterday, another handy one is: unicode-search.net
which lets you search by description, such as my search for the chess character for [queen] (to find the character of ♕). I was surprised a bit to find out that the word "queen" also appears for other Unicode characters as well. Here's a screen shot of the results from Unicode-search.net for [queen]

I've seen some emojis used in advertising, which could be useful if you're looking for a place to eat 🍕 in Egypt. (Use the Advanced Search menu to limit your searches to Egypt.)

But my favorite example (thus far) is the query:

    [ Ꭰ lesson ]

now that LOOKS like a strange query, but the "D" term in the query is actually a "Ꭰ" which is the Cherokee language letter for their "a" (the vowel). Thus, this query is actually looking for texts that have a Cherokee Ꭰ in them and are about a lesson. In other words, this is a clever way to find texts that are written in Cherokee (or some part of them is), and is a lesson.

By using a very common letter from the Cherokee alphabet, I'm able to find Cherokee texts using a simple Google search. Note that there's no way to limit Google's results to only those in Cherokee, so this is a quick approximation to that function. (Note that you could do the same trick for other languages: just pick a common letter in the other language, and search for that character--for instance,

    [ ᖃ lesson ]

will find information about Inuktitut (the Inuit language). That character, ᖃ, is reasonably common in Inuktitut.

So what uses can you find!

Let us know. I'll be back next Tuesday to let you know what other ideas I come up with.

Search on!