A couple weeks ago, Google began showing Emoji characters in desktop search results after years of showing them in the mobile results.

Surprise, surprise, Google will be dropping them soon from the search results – at least the desktop results. How soon? I don’t know, but I’d say within a week.

Why are they dropping it, well webmasters have begun dressing up their title tags and snippets with them making the search results a cartoon mess. For example, Expedia tested emojis and I know many publishers have already as well.

Google’s John Mueller in a Google+ hangout was asked this at 51:40 mark and answered they will be going away. He said “it is kind of a waste of time” since “soon they will not be shown at all.”

Here is the video response:

Here is my best effort at transcribing it, it is hard to hear some words:

Back in 2003 Google dropped the unicode symbols from showing in the SERPs as well – that was over 10 years ago!

💀 to emoji in the Google SERPs 💀

Forum discussion at Google+.