There is plenty of praise and acclaim for Google’s efforts in being able to bring a virtual keyboard on screen. This will allow users of the web search engine to type in special characters without having to bend their backs copy pasting text data from various sources. Simply put, regardless of the keyboard that you have on your computer, the search engine will easily allow you to input text that requires special characters.
This little service is extremely useful in countries such as Russia, Greece, Germany, and many more where words are commonly spelled using characters that are not normally found in the standard keyboard. This often limits the range of search results from being able to get hits and matches that are written in a non-English language.
Right now, the virtual keyboard is able to cater to about 35 different writing languages. Google is still working on expanding the service.
One of the great things about the new keyboard is more than just the fact that it is able to help out people with language specific searches, but it is also touch screen friendly. The interface is easy to use and getting the popup window present feels quite natural. To use the virtual keyboard, the user may opt to directly click or tap the onscreen keyboard buttons or they can also press the corresponding keys on their physical keyboard.
At this point, we can clearly see that the internet is moving towards a more touch based environment. While this is not really leading up to the Appletopia that Steve Jobs is depicting in his blogs, it does show where the real of web design is heading.
More than web design, Google’s new keyboard is a move towards the globalization of the internet. With cyberspace spanning across borders like nothing else can, it is high time we actually got some tools that helped us communicate and browse across sites that use different languages.
Tags: Google, Google-Virtual-Keyboard, Touchscreen-technology