Shashank's blog

Friday, April 30, 2010

Integrating virtual keyboards in Google search

You’ve spilled coffee on your keyboard. The a, e, i, o, u, and r keys have stopped working. Now try to search Google for the nearest computer repair shop. The pain of typing on this broken keyboard is similar to what many people searching in non-English languages feel when trying to type today. Typing searches on keyboards not designed for your languages can be frustrating, even impossible.

Our user research has shown that many people are more comfortable formulating search queries in their own language but have difficulty typing these queries into Google. (Try typing नमस्ते on a keyboard with English letters.) To overcome the difficulty they face in typing in their local language scripts, some people have resorted to copying and pasting from other sites and from online translation tools. But there’s an easier way — a virtual, or “on-screen” keyboard, lets you type directly in your local language script in an easy and consistent manner, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using.

Virtual keyboards let people type directly in their local language script and don't require any additional software.

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.

How to Create a Bootable Pen Drive

What if you don’t have a DVD writer or CD writer to format your Windows which is installed on yourPC and suddenly if it gets affected with virus? What do you do? Buying a DVD writer would be the only option to you but let me tell you that to recognize a particular Dvd writer older versions ofmotherboard requires the drivers to be installed. The only resort to you is boot from a USB Flash drive and the process of making a Flash Drive bootable is listed below.

What you need?

To start with you should have a pen drive with minimum of 4 GB and more for Windows 7 and 2 GB for Windows XP if you want to make a bootable USB Flash Drive. Other requirements includes installed Windows 7 or XP or XP Service Pack 2 DVD (CD of XP/ SP2 also acceptable) and if you don’t have such disk then you should create one. There are also limitations on which a particular flash drive will work or not, the prime factors are flash drive maximum capacity and speed of copying. Speed of copying isn’t a big factor but formatting would be very slow if copying speed is slow and keeping all those in mind USB 2.0 would be perfectly preferred. So total a Windows XPbootable CD, USB Pen Drive of atleast 4GB will do it.

Procedure
1. Format your Flash Drive
The first step towards creating a bootable Flash Drive is formatting your Pen Drive. by default the windows, Windows 7 will format you Pen Drive in FAT format but ensure that it been formatted in FAT file system.

Formatting Pen Drive

Once the Pen drive formatting is over move to next step.

2. Download WinToFlash free]. Once the download is complete you need to install the program and run it. The software is of size 6.7 MB and doesn’t take 2 mins to download it.

3. As soon as you launch the program installed, you would get the following screen.