Jeremy Burge — Apple’s Emoji Search is Bad I’ve been aware of...

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
Apple’s Emoji Search is BadI’ve been aware of this for quite some time, but until recently haven’t sat down to figure out what’s going on.
You would know the feeling. You open Apple’s built-in emoji picker on macOS (Ctrl-Cmd-Space) and type a search...

Apple’s Emoji Search is Bad

I’ve been aware of this for quite some time, but until recently haven’t sat down to figure out what’s going on.

You would know the feeling. You open Apple’s built-in emoji picker on macOS (Ctrl-Cmd-Space) and type a search term. I wanted this emoji:


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The obvious thing to type? “Plate” of course. Here’s what that returns:

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Oh. Um. Knife?

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Fork?

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Here we go. It’s called 🍽 Fork and Knife With Plate so for some reason the search needs to start with fork? Okay.

How about the woman with the raised hand? 🙋‍♀️ Don’t type “raised”.

The search term that will make her appear is “raising”:

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A fun part of this is that the emoji with the raised eyebrow will appear for the term “raised” yet not “eyebrow”

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🤨

🙋‍♀️ Brief primer on emoji names

Each emoji can have multiple names. Take this one: 🤪. There is a code point for this in the Unicode Standard known as 🤪 U+1F92A GRINNING FACE WITH ONE LARGE AND ONE SMALL EYE. The name of the code point is always in English, and can never change.

Unicode also keeps a set of characters names in a repository (called CLDR) that is localised into many languages. These localised names can change over time, and are often different to the Unicode code point name, even in English.

There’s no requirement that vendors use either of these Unicode-specified names. Apple does its own localisation, often resulting in its own unique name This emoji is called “🤪 Goofy Face” on the Mac.

To recap, the names of this emoji are:

  • Unicode Name: 🤪 Grinning Face With One Large and One Small Eye
  • CLDR Name: 🤪 Zany Face
  • Apple Name: 🤪 Goofy Face

😒 Back to the bad emoji search

So here we are. Let’s say you type the Apple name for an emoji. Will it always come up? No.

The woman raising her hand? Apple calls her “Happy Woman Raising One Hand”:

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If you search for this exact phrase, no results are shown:

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It’s not clear why “raising” works as a search term here but not “happy” or “happy woman” (or even “hand” fails to bring this up).

And then there is sorting.

The characters 👩 Woman and 👨 Man are basic emojis used quite frequently. Search for "woman” and technically she is in the results, but good luck finding her! Give it a shot:

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Sorting is a challenge, so I don’t want to harp on here. But it does seem like an exact match of the Unicode name, CLDR name and Apple name should probably bring up that emoji in the top 10 at least.

(Spoiler if you hadn’t found her yet: bottom-row in the middle)

Search for “man” and the first result is… 👩‍🔧 Woman Mechanic.

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I could go on.

  • To find 👉 Backhand Index Pointing Right you can type “pointing” but not “index” or “finger”
  • To find 🤦 Person Facepalming you can’t type “facepalm” or “palm” but instead need to type “face palm”
  • To find 🔫 Pistol you need to search for “water” or “water pistol” but not “pistol”
  • To find 🗺️ World Map you can type “world” or “map” but not “world map”
  • To find 🐚 Spiral Shell you can’t search “shell” but “sea shell” will work
  • And to find ❌ Cross Mark I have no idea what to type. Cross, Multiply, X, Red X…none of them show this emoji. (let me know if you can figure out what to type!)

That’s not to say the emoji search in Sierra and High Sierra can’t be smart.

If I search for “sassy” I get the 💁 Information Desk Person, despite this appearing nowhere in her name. "Summer” returns the suns and beach-related emojis without additional work.

Prior to macOS Sierra’s release in September 2016, emoji search for Mac was the opposite: general terms wouldn’t return any results - but if you knew the emoji name you could get it to appear 100% of the time. This is no longer the case.

I do wonder if an internal effort to make these types of search and prediction tools better in the longer term is making them worse for users in the short term.


Notes

  • 📲 Some of this is also relevant for iOS emoji-suggest (which I find better to use and more consistent than the Mac’s explicit search feature)
  • 🔍 It does seem like Apple may have switched their “emoji search” for Mac to being some variation of “emoji predict” on iOS, but with less testing
  • 🤓 Yes, I’m aware there are other ways to insert emojis on the Mac. Rocket is a great solution for using short-codes to insert emojis on a Mac!
  • 😟 Other areas that have gone down-hill on Apple platforms in recent years:
      • auto-correct
      • auto-predict
    • Are these related? I don’t know.
    • Auto-correct and predictive suggestions are harder to measure than a simple emoji search.
  • 🔍 iOS emoji search is one of the top feature requests I see whenever Apple releases new emojis. If it works like the Mac, I don’t think people would be all that pleased.
  • 👉 Last note: I just searched for “search” to get that magnifying glass, and instead got two detectives 🤦‍♂️
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