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Emoji could soon take over domain names

Thanks to a search engine from GoDaddy, anyone with a phone can easily find and register available emoji domains.

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Carrie Mihalcik Former Managing Editor / News
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Who needs words when you have emoji?

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GoDaddy wants to make all your emoji dreams come true.

The internet domain registrar and web hosting company is making it easier to search for and register available emoji-based domains. On Friday, the company launched a search engine for emoji domains. People can visit the site on their phones, type in a string of emoji and see if the domain is available.

Right now .ws is the only top level domain accepting emoji, according to GoDaddy. Top-tier domains, like .com or .org, don't allow for emoji.

Technically, emoji domains have been around for years. GoDaddy provides a timeline on its search site. But they were difficult to search for and required some understanding of how the domain name system handles characters. (If ASCII or Punycode mean anything to you, you probably already knew about emoji-based domains.) GoDaddy's site aims to make it easy for anyone with a phone to find available emoji domains.

As more of the world increasingly uses the internet on phones and other mobile devices, a flood of emoji-based domains seems inevitable. Heck, even the Touch Bar on Apple's new MacBook Pro will let you type in emoji, something that's difficult to do with a traditional computer keyboard.

So let the race for emoji domains begin.