Tuesday, June 30, 2026 The search symbol that needs only seven characters (https://www.newsonaut.com/articles/the-search-symbol-that-needs-only-seven-characters) Back in the day, reporters would record their phone interviews by attaching a suction cup to the back of the earpiece part of the handset. It was attached by wire to a machine that did the recording. You can still buy them. (https://ukdj.co.uk/products/eagle-altai-a171-telephone-recording-pickup-coil-suction-cup-microphone) There was a time when their use was widespread enough to warrant their own unicode. This consisted of circle with a stem coming out of the bottom left. Does that remind you of anything? How about a magnifying glass? The near-universal symbol for search is a magnifying glass. Granted, that symbol usually has the stem coming out the bottom right, but still — the resemblance is uncanny. Unicode for telephone recorder: ⌕ Font Awesome SVG for magnifying glass: That SVG from Font Awesome looks pretty good, but it uses hundreds of characters as opposed to seven for the unicode. And do you really want a third-party dependency just for a magnifying glass? Unicode code ⌕ Font Awesome code You don’t have to stop there. Unicode has over 100,000 symbols (https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/) to choose from. If you just need a few items for your blog, this is the way to go. (Yes, I know about the emojis 🔍 (🔍) and 🔎 (🔎), but they don’t even look good in a retro way.)