Oliver Haslam on May 25, 2016, 6:08 am

You Can Now Use Emoji In The iOS Spotlight Area To Search For A Myriad Of Things

Whoever said emoji were a waste of time? Turns out Apple didn’t, because the iPhone maker has added support for the little icons right within Spotlight on iOS.

You may be forgiven for wondering how support for emoji makes any sense whatsoever in Spotlight, and if we’re brutally honest, so did we when we first heard about this. In practice, though, the whole thing kind of makes sense, and above all, it certainly works.

We are, of course, talking about Spotlight’s new ability to display search results based on the emoji that has been entered. As an example, using the pizza emoji in the Search field, Spotlight will go away and come back with a list of pizza establishments in the area. Using the pants or dress emoji yields nearby clothing stores and the train emoji lists schedules for local train routes. Search with the tree emoji and you will be offered a list of local parks, while even searching for a mushroom will return web pages based on Nintendo stalwart Mario. How cool is that?

Those are just a few of the options too, with so many more to be found. One of our favorites is using the beer emoji to search for bars and such, which works surprisingly well when you’ve had a few drinks, we suspect!

Entering the pizza emoji within the Spotlight search bar returns messages containing the same, related websites and nearby pizza places

It’s not really all that clear when Apple added support for emoji within iOS Spotlight or indeed if it came as part of a recent iOS 9.3.2 update or was handled on the server side within Apple’s data centers. However, the change was carried out and exactly how it happened doesn’t really matter to us, especially when we’re busy searching for every emoji we can think of in order to see what Spotlight comes back with.

What a time to be alive!

(Via: Cult of Mac)