Google is massively removing emoticons from company names

[Marcin Karwowski]

I just noticed that a while ago a huge number of business owners received an email with the same content, that their name was updated and the emoticon was removed from the name.

Apparently, Google finally decided to clean it up and removed emojis from names en masse. It's a beautiful day if emoticons in company names finally disappear.

 

[whitespark]

I got a notification today about an "®" being removed from a name. This client needs that in their name, though. We'll have to revert the update.

 

[Marcin Karwowski]

I got a notification today about an "®" being removed from a name. This client needs that in their name, though. We'll have to revert the update.

Perhaps the algorithm is sensitive not only to emoticons but to any non-standard character.

 

[Tony Wang]

Perhaps the algorithm is sensitive not only to emoticons but to any non-standard character.

What!?! You mean Google paints with a broad brush and can't detect subtleties that are obvious to the human eye???

 

[Marcin Karwowski]

What!?! You mean Google paints with a broad brush and can't detect subtleties that are obvious to the human eye???

I don't know how the algorithm works, but since Darren @whitespark noticed that not only emoticons are removed, but also other non-standard characters, it is possible.
It's not the first time an algorithm works against logic

 

[JS Girard]

It's probably a specific subset of characters that for some reason includes the ® character. Maybe because everything in the enclosed alphanumeric Unicode block gets removed and AI stupidly includes the registered symbol as too similar?

The easiest way to target emojis is with Unicode blocks, so I assume that's how they'd do any other chars, but taking out ® that way wouldn't work because it's in the Latin-1 Supplement block...