Yelp allows users to search for businesses and restaurants using emojis
If you want to search for a nearby pizza restaurant, just enter the pizza emoji into Yelp. This is the new move for the business-finding app.
It’s not the first big move for emojis, which recently appeared in a Peta campaign, as well as featuring in Katy Perry's texts of the lyrics to Roar, but it is an interesting one.
Now, we no longer need to write the word ‘pizza’, saving ourselves about half a second. If you’re looking for a place with pizza and beer, just add the emoji of a pint after the one for pizza and voila. You’ll find places nearby with both pizza and alcohol.
According to Engadget, the app's engineers came up with the idea during a recent company hackathon.
Given that there are probably enough emojis to help you find everything (if you use the right combination) this could be an interesting move and the future of search – after all, Google and Pinterest have both made recent acquisitions to their image recognition side - or it could just be a gimmick.