How to Use Emojis to Search for Funny Videos on YouTube

The group of researchers has created a prototype of a search engine that makes it possible to combine your love of funny animal videos with Emojis. So, with its help, you are able to search for videos on YouTube by using hilarious tiny icons.

Called Emoji2Video, this search engine was created by researchers at the University of Amsterdam and Qualcomm Research. It was designed to show how these smilies can be used to give an easy-to-understand and clear representation of what is happening in videos. Users of this website can click on one or more given emojis, and the pictograms you select will be used to find a data set of 45k YouTube videos. The authors of the project are convinced that their creation has all features needed to provide you with very specific things you are searching for.

Emoji smilies were made in Japan in the 1990s but have become popular in recent years when smartphone makers have added them to the keyboard, making it easier to text messages with tiny heart or an itty-bitty cup of coffee.

Moreover, these icons are used so often that some search engines and online services allow users to search via emoji: Microsoft's Bing accepts emoji queries and in Yelp you can search for business typing, for example, a bird emoji rather than the word bird.

The developers of Emoji2Video applied deep-learning techniques to create emoji labels for videos that can represent what’s in them (for instance, dog or a football) and to find out how likely it is that particular objects are in a given frame. So, if your favorite video involves cats you can visit the website and test this program by picking the cat emoji. Likely, results will include a list of various cat videos, such as a cat licking grass in a backyard or a video advertising cat toys.

Furthermore, if you type three smilies at once, say, a birthday cake, an angry face and a camel, the top video result will cover two out of three, as it’ll represent someone demonstrating masterly-made Angry Birds-themed cake.

The researchers plan to modernize the search engine and add more emojis and videos, as now it covers only a tiny fraction of the videos available on YouTube. One of the coauthors, Spencer Cappallo, says that sometimes top results don’t exactly represent the emoji with which you’re searching because the data set doesn’t support video wanted.

Linguist and co-founder of Idibon, Tyler Schnoebelen, says that such search engine could be used for searching videos made by someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you. He also emphasizes that the meanings behind each smiley can vary depending on the cultural characteristics, which can make it harder to find the required translations. In such a case, the standout example is an eggplant emoji, as it’s frequently considered to represent a phallus in some countries.