Emojis bring life to any conversation, even though over-using them could make you seem childish. Apple seems to agree on the importance of emojis as the company has just added a way to search by emoji in iOS Spotlight area.
I have to admit, the idea appears to be silly at first, but wait until you try it. Spotlight not lets you use emojis as search terms and display relevant results. For example, if you use a beer emoji, you will get results with all the nearby restaurants, bars, diners and other food venues that serve beer. So why type ‘beer’ when you can ’emoji’ it instead?
Before we proceed, you should know emoji search is available only in countries where Spotlight Search is supported. You can view the complete list of supported countries here.
How to search by Emoji in iOS Spotlight Area
To search by emoji in Spotlight area, the first thing you need to do is swipe down on the home screen to open Spotlight Search. Then, press and hold on the globe key and select ‘Emoji‘ from the drop down menu.
Note: If you don’t have the option available, you will have to add the Emoji keyboard, which you can do from Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard.
Now all you have left to do is type an emoji into Spotlight Search. Not all emojis work at the moment so you won’t get results if you use one that’s not currently supported.
Here are a few that actually work – beer, pizza, tacos, money, ticket, dress and other clothing items, family, package, train, and trees. Most of them are quite intuitive, but surprisingly using the mushrooms emoji brings up Super Mario Bros. results.
At the moment, it is not clear if the emoji support was added to Spotlight Search directly, or as a part of the iOS 9.3.2 update but what really matters is we can now search by emoji in iOS Spotlight area and make more use out of these fun stickers.
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