Show HN: Open-source emoji search engine and emoji picker component

2 points

2 years ago

Hi HN, I recently created and published an open-source emoji search engine library with the goal to help people easily find the emoji matches for their search input. The idea came to me when I was using the native emoji app and often ran into issues where searching for common day to day words, such as goal, problem and solution, return no emojis.

I took a deeper dive into the issue and found that the cause is due to that the emoji keyword database is constructed by going through each emoji and adding associated keywords, which works great for directly related keywords but misses indirectly related keywords and day to day words. This is solved by also doing the opposite, which goes through each word and adds associated emojis, such as going through the top 1000 words in wordfrequency.info/samples.asp. I discuss more of this process as well as building an Algolia-inspired ranking algorithm that optimizes for search-as-you-type experience in this article: https://www.emoogle.org/blog/building-the-best-emoji-search-..., that might be an interesting read to see the steps and logics.

Top highlights of the emoji search engine are: 1. Largest emoji keywords database with 5,400+ unique keywords for 1,872 emojis 2. Advanced ranking algorithm with 10+ rules to sort most relevant results first 3. Blazingly fast search-as-you-type experience that takes ~10ms or less 4. Customizable options to personalize search experience

I hope other emoji fans might find this library useful and I look forward to hearing any feedback the community has. Thanks all.

Emoji search engine Github repo: https://github.com/xitanggg/emoogle-emoji-search-engine

Emoji picker component Github repo: https://github.com/xitanggg/emoogle-emoji-picker (This is the emoji picker UI component that integrates with the search engine. Its main advantages over the native emoji picker is much faster speed and supports search autocomplete and preview)

Demo link: https://www.emoogle.org/emoji-search

(Disclaimer: Both emoji search engine and emoji picker component are used in the Emoogle emoji desktop app that I developed. The desktop app is closed-source and is paid after 14 days of free trial, but I hope open-sourcing the core search engine and component are helpful for anyone else looking to provide a better emoji experience in their apps or services)