Google Implements A Virtual Keyboard To Its Search Bar

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If you use Google search in languages either than English, you might have noticed a little keyboard icon next to the search bar in the past week. If you were game enough to click on it, a virtual keyboard would have popped up. This is the latest tool Google has released to make your experience much easier and user-friendly.

The virtual keyboard was officially announced by Google today.

Last year, to make text input easy for people across the globe, we introduced a virtual keyboard API through code.google.com. This allowed developers to enable virtual keyboards on any text field or text area in their webpages. Today, we are taking this effort one step further by integrating virtual keyboards into Google search in 35 languages.

Google product manager Manish Bhargava stated that these virtual keyboards “are more comfortable formulating search queries in their own language but have difficulty typing these queries into Google.” She adds that they’re also useful for when the keyboard’s broken.

After checking the 35 languages, English is not one of them. However, I would like to see a virtual symbols keyboard implemented on the English-based Google sites. Kind of like the Character Viewer on a Mac. That way when I’m on a PC running Windows, I don’t always have to open Microsoft Word, find the character and then copy and paste it.