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.
A virtual keyboard on www.google.am to input Armenian text (the query term is [armenia])
If you use Google search in one of the languages listed below, you’ll see a small keyboard icon show up next to the search field, on both the Google homepage and search results page. Clicking on that keyboard icon brings up a virtual keyboard in your language. You can input text by either clicking on the on-screen keyboard or pressing the corresponding key.
You can find out more information on how to use the virtual keyboard in our help article. If you use Google in a language not listed below and feel that your language will benefit from a virtual keyboard, let us know by voting for your language. We hope virtual keyboards help you find information more easily — especially those of you who speak/type/read in non-Latin scripts.
Example feeds: [CNN], [the economist], [entertainment weekly], [national geographic] Google Places Also this week we announced that the Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. With one out of five searches on Google related to location, we wanted to better connect Place Pages (which launched last September for more than 50 million places globally) to a tool that enables businesses to manage their Google presence. With this change, business owners will benefit from several new ways to expand their online presence, while making it easier for you to make better decisions about local shopping. From real-time coupon updates to interior photos of businesses on place pages, these ongoing enhancements will make local search all the more useful to you. The launch of Google Places is just the beginning of Google becoming more local. If you're a business owner and want to learn more, check out google.com/places.
For many Internet users, it is not always easy to write in languages that use unique character sets like Hindi, Hebrew and Arabic. Most computer keyboards only allow for the input of Roman characters (the alphabet used by most Western languages) and converting between scripts can be difficult. To make this process easier we launched an improved version of Google Transliteration at the end of last year, a service which enables you to phonetically convert Roman letters into a variety of other scripts.
Today we’re delighted to announce support for five new languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Oriya and Sinhalese. This bring the total up to 22 languages spoken across Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. These new languages are currently available at http://www.google.com/transliterate.
Since you can’t use Google Transliteration offline we also launched the transliteration based “Input Method Editor” (IME) earlier this year. Once you download and install the Google Transliteration IME (don’t worry, it's free), you can type a word the way it sounds using Roman characters and the software will convert the word to its native script. For example, typing "hamesha" in Google Hindi IME transliterates into Hindi as: हमेशा.
As an improvement to the IME, we’ve recently added 5 more languages (Amharic, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian and Tigrinya) as well as canonical schemes, macros and support for Windows 64-bit. You can read about all these powerful new features on the Google Transliteration IME help page.
Now what if you come across a language that you can speak but can’t read? For example, if you can speak Hindi, you may know that “namaste” is a greeting, however you may not be able to read ‘नमस्ते’ in Hindi script. Our new Script Converter tool converts a given web page or piece of text from one script to another so that you can read it phonetically. Script Converter currently supports 17 languages: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
So, try out these tools and let us know what you think.
Posted by New Melchizedec Sundararaj, Software Engineer
Just as societies preserve important documents and works of art, archivists and historians are now developing ways to preserve digital ephemera, from tweets to book drafts, as part our cultural and global history. On a small scale, Ken is doing just that, and we’re intrigued by his creative method of preserving moments in time. We may not have majored in art history, but we like the “meta” quality of Ken’s paintings of search results for pop artists. From Brillo pad boxes to Google in under 25 moves...?
You can see more of Ken’s work on his website. And if you live in New York, Ken is exhibiting these pieces in a one-man show at the Josée Bienvenu Gallery until May 15.
On Tuesday, April 13, a powerful 6.9 earthquake shook the province of Qinghai, China, resulting in widespread destruction and the loss of more than 1,700 lives. Working closely with GeoEye, we’ve been able to acquire some high resolution post-earthquake imagery, which vividly illustrates the magnitude of this tragic event.
(click image to view full-size; click here to view in Google Earth)
To see more of this imagery, you can download the KML here and open it in Google Earth.
In addition, an international team, including many of our Chinese Googlers, have worked to create a Crisis Response page for the earthquake with several additional resources:
The China Person Finder tool, which can be used to submit or search for information about individuals who may have been affected. It is available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English, and is accessible on mobile. We encourage organizations and media sites to embed the gadget on their sites and help spread the word.
Google News and real-time search, which features posts to Twitter and other sources. This provides the latest information from authoritative sources and people on the ground.
A My Map to help users contribute data about Qinghai, such as the conditions in specific areas and rescue efforts underway.
The Chinese version of this page can be accessed from a link on our homepages on google.com.hk and google.com.tw, and we will continue to update the pages as more materials become available.
Oftentimes, there's great new content published to the web that everyone is talking about at one particular time. So, to help you find those sites, we also recently launched the top links for a set of update results, showcasing some of the top URLs that Twitter users are talking about based on a particular query. To view these links, click “Show options” on the search results page, and then select “Updates.” You'll see a list of links on the right-hand side based on your query.
Google Suggest and spell correction enhancements We've recently made some enhancements that make it easier and faster for you to get the most relevant answer using Google search. We've begun to tailor Suggest to U.S. metro areas, so you'll find that the suggested queries are more locally relevant than they used to be. Try searching for [parks in], and you'll most likely see suggested search queries for parks that really are in your neck of the woods.
In addition, we've improved our spelling correction feature. Sometimes, when you search for something that we're highly confident you've misspelled, we'll take you directly to the search results page for the correct spelling without asking "Did you mean...?" This week, we made this feature available in 31 languages across over 180 domains across the globe. We've also made some changes to how this feature deals with misspelled names. We realized that often when you search for a person's name, you include descriptive words (say, the person's profession or company) that can provide valuable context. We use these extra descriptors to offer you better suggestions, so you should soon find this feature for names more useful.
show up next to the search field, on both the Google homepage and search results page. Clicking on that keyboard icon brings up a virtual keyboard in your language. You can input text by either clicking on the on-screen keyboard or pressing the corresponding key.
