Hey, I’m Chloe. I started my apprenticeship here at Silkstream about a month ago, making me the newest member of the team. Before I started here, I had a strong interest in social media and digital marketing, but I was practically clueless about the world of SEO. Diving in to the world of the unknown, I set out on a mission to build a solid understanding and learn the ways of SEO experts such as Silkstream’s very own Ria and Hayley.

Of course, to begin my research I did what most of us do and headed straight to Google for answers…Ironic huh? With strange words and terms like crawlers, Robot.txt, Black hat SEO and cloaking being thrown at me, it quickly became clear that I’d gotten myself into a strange, magical sounding blur. However, after a day or two of dedicated reading and some serious YouTube video explanations, it all started to make sense. The mystery of SEO was no longer!

I am going to be writing a weekly blog post here on Silkstream titled ‘My week in search’, where I will be discussing what I have learnt throughout the week and any interesting news that I have found out about Social media, digital marketing or SEO. Although these things may come as a second nature to some readers of this blog, I hope that it will be interesting for you to follow my journey as I progress from rookie status.

This week I found out about Bing’s recent attempt to up the search game by incorporating Emoji’s into search terms. Bing have enabled their search engine to take a semantic meaning of an Emoji and transfer it into a text string, therefore returning results for pages related to the popular, gimmick images. The use of one Emoji to search usually returns the meaning of the specific Emoji you have used, whereas combination Emoji searches have a more complex meaning.

Although Emoji’s are most commonly found and used on mobile, searches are also compatible on browsers that do not usually support Emoji’s such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. On the down side, Google Chrome is still trailing behind and lacks the ability to participate. I wonder how long it will take for Google to catch up…

I’ve got to give it to Bing on this one, they beat Google to it! Although Emoji searches are arguably just a novelty feature, they do allow users who frequently use Emoji’s a quick way of finding results they may be looking for, which is what search engines are all about right? Where’s the harm in that?