What do you do when you need to search for something? Why you fire up your browser, go to the Google search engine and type in your query. Simple enough, right? But what if you are not an English speaking user and would like to enter a search query in your native language? This could be a bit of a bother – the keyboard is in English and the query is not.

According to Product Manager with Google Internalization, Manish Bhargava, users have found some workarounds for this issue. They have for example turned to copying and pasting from other sites, or copying and pasting from online translation tools. This did not make for a pleasurable user experience.

“Typing searches on keyboards not designed for your languages can be frustrating, even impossible,” said Manish Bhargava.

Google decided to address the issue by rolling out a virtual keyboard that provides support for a grand total of 35 languages. Thanks to this virtual keyboard the user can easily enter a query in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, or Russian.

The virtual keyboard is available on Google Search in the following languages: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Galician, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Macedonian, Malayalam, Mongolian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Tatar, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Uzbek.

To use the virtual keyboard you need only go to Google Russia for example, click the virtual keyboard icon and start clicking away – check out the images at the bottom. If you need any help using the virtual keyboard, the Google team has put together a useful help article that you can check out here.

Do you think your language could benefit from a virtual keyboard on Google Search? If you do, then you can vote for your language here.

Update: There's a virtual keyboard on Google Romania as well.