Bing Search Testing Varied Favicons / Emojis In Title Tags

Here is an interesting test from Microsoft Bing. The search company is testing placing a newspaper emoji and a magnifying glass emoji as the favicon in the title of the search results pages. It’s unusual and I’m not sure why Bing is testing it, but they are.

Frank Sandtmann, a German based SEO consultant, sent me a bunch of screenshots of this happening. I was able to replicate this myself with a lot of refreshing and here are my screenshots of these emoji and favicon tests:

Normal Bing favicon:

Magnifying glass emoji:

Newspaper emoji:

Why is Microsoft Bing testing this? I’m not sure…

Forum discussion at Twitter.