While we’ve probably all turned to Google to settle a bet, often we need more than just a quick answer.

You might be looking for information to help you complete a longer-running task, whether it’s meal planning for a new food regimen, researching new stretching routines for post-gym recovery or picking up a new hobby. You might come back to Search to find information on the same topic, hoping to retrace your steps or discover new, related ideas.

To help you with these ongoing search journeys, we’re launching new activity cards to help you pick up where you left off. If you’re logged into your Google account and search for topics and hobbies like cooking, interior design, fashion, skincare and beauty, fitness, photography and more, you may find an activity card at the top of the results page that provides easy ways to continue your exploration.

You’ll find links to pages you’ve visited in the past along with searches you’ve done. From there, you can easily click back to that recipe that you tried and loved, or re-issue a search to discover new facets of that topic.

If you want to mark a page to read or reference later, just touch and hold the link to quickly add items on your activity card to a collection. You can access  your collections by tapping the menu on the top left of the Search page (on mobile web), or through the bottom bar of the Google app.

You can control what appears in your activity card by pressing to delete an item or turn off cards by tapping the 3-dot icon. For more options to customize your Search experience, you can access your full history and settings right in Search.

Activity cards will roll out today on mobile web and the Google app in English in the U.S. As you’re looking to build new habits or pick up new tasks in the new year--whether sticking to an exercise regimen, sprucing up your winter wardrobe, or collecting new ideas for your home--we hope this new feature helps you along your way and makes your search history more accessible and useful.

Our goal with Gboard is to help you communicate in a way that’s comfortable and natural, regardless of the language you speak. While the ten most common languages cover about half of the world's population, many more thousands of languages are spoken by the other half. As the Next Billion Users come online, technology needs to support their languages so they can get the most out of using the internet. Today, Gboard offers more than 500 language varieties on Android, bringing a smart, AI-driven typing experience to many more people around the world. This means that more than 90% of the world can now type in their first language with Gboard, with keyboard layouts tailored to each language and typing smarts like autocorrect and predictive text.

In December 2016, Gboard first launched on Android with about 100 language varieties. Over the last few months, more than one hundred new languages have been added to Gboard, such as Nigerian Pidgin (~30 million speakers), Rangpuri (~15 million speakers), Balinese (~3 million speakers), Pontic Greek (~800,000 speakers) and many more.

A quick look at the layouts below shows the sheer diversity of input methods used across the world every day:

Gboard currently supports more than 40 writing systems across the world, ranging from alphabets used across many languages, like Roman and Cyrillic, to scripts that are used for only one language, like Ol Chiki (used for Santali).

Building technology that works across languages is important: without a keyboard tailored to your language, simple things like messaging friends or family can be a challenge. Often, keyboard apps don’t support the characters and scripts used for languages with a smaller speaking population. As an example, the Nigerian language "Ásụ̀sụ̀ Ị̀gbò" is impossible to type on an English keyboard. Plus, wouldn't it be frustrating to see nearly every word you type incorrectly autocorrected into another language?

Many of Gboard’s newly added languages are traditionally not widely written, such as in newspapers or books, so they’re rarely found online. But as we spend more time on our phones on messaging apps and social media, people are now typing in these languages more than ever. The ability to easily type in these languages lets people communicate with others in the language they would normally speak face-to-face as well.

How we add new languages to Gboard

In addition to designing a new keyboard layout, every time a new language is added to Gboard we create a new machine learning language model. This model trains Gboard to know when and how to autocorrect your typing, or to predict your next word. For languages like English, which has only about 30 characters and large amounts of written materials widely available, this is easy. For many of the world's languages, though, this process is much harder.

In order to train our machine learning language models, we need a text corpus (which is a database of lots of available texts written in a particular language). Often, finding text data in these languages can be challenging. When we can’t find data online, we’ll share a list of writing prompts with native speakers, so we can create new text corpora from scratch. (You can read more about our crawling efforts for these languages in one of our recent research papers.)

Next, we focus on the layout design. Layout design for a new language on Gboard requires careful investigation and research to fit in all the characters in a way that makes sense to native speakers. If there isn’t a lot of information for the language available online, we'll analyze text corpora to figure out which characters to include and to determine how frequently they’re used.

Depending on the language, we may tailor aspects of the layout, like the set of digits—for example, while English uses 0123456789, Hindi and other Indian languages written in Devanagari use ०१२३४५६७८९. Once we've built support for a language, we always invite a group of native speakers to test and fill out a survey to understand their typing experience.

To see if your language is already supported in our latest Gboard release in the Play Store, check out the list of supported languages in our help center.

Across America, people celebrate next week’s day of thanks with their own unique traditions, and many come to Search for help to pull off Turkey Day like a pro. (In fact, you can simply search “Thanksgiving” and find video tips from expert chefs on how to master mashed potatoes or ideas to elevate a pumpkin pie!)

But there’s a cornucopia of searches you can do, and we took a look at some of the top and trending ideas that people are gobbling up to hone their side dish skills and perfect their pie game.

Pardon me, but how do you plan to prep your turkey?

There are many ways to toast a turkey, but here are the preferred cooking methods across the U.S. this year. While the Eastern Seaboard and some of the Southwest is fond of frying, smoked birds are booming in nearly half the country. Hawaii joins New England in sticking to the classic roasted turkey.

Party fowl

As people gear up for one of the year’s biggest get-togethers for family and friends, questions arise about how to make sure that their fowl doesn’t flop and, this year, how to ensure that the bird they select is safe to eat. Here are some top turkey searches trending right now:

• Turkey salmonella outbreak (breakout trend)

• Turkey recall (+3950% YoY)

• How to thaw a frozen turkey (+550% YoY)

• Turkey size chart (+400% YoY)

Let’s dish on sides

For many, Thanksgiving meals are more about the sweet and salty sides and the gravy train that goes along with them. But making a dinner that satisfies the dietary needs of all of your guests can be a challenge—and many of you are coming to search for ideas to tailor your menus accordingly. Here are a few insights around these diet-specific dish trends:

• “Keto Thanksgiving” searches are hitting an all time high in 2018, with “keto Thanksgiving sides” up 70% YoY.

• “Vegan Thanksgiving” has the highest interest among diet-specific searches, more than double the search interest of “keto Thanksgiving” and “vegetarian Thanksgiving” searches.

• “Gluten free Thanksgiving” is also on the rise, with searches for “gluten free thanksgiving sides” (+300% YoY), desserts (+100% YoY) and stuffing (+90% YoY) all trending up since last year.

Pie, in charts

Everyone has their own festive favorite when it comes to Thanksgiving Day dessert. Here’s a slice of the top pies people are searching for:

Many of these pie preferences can be regional, too. Here are the places where the top pies are poppin’ on Search.

No matter how you celebrate and give thanks, you can find all the ideas you need on Search, get to your friends and family quickly and safely with help from Google Maps, and get to gobbling up that grub.

We communicate in pictures more than ever before. Emoji, stickers, or GIFs often get your point across better than just words. Can you imagine celebrating a birthday without the cake emoji, or *life* without the Carlton GIF? Conversations would be so much more boring—and more misunderstood—without them.

For those of us who just can’t even without the perfect GIF ( … or emoji, or sticker), never fear, Gboard is here! On Gboard, you can search for stickers, emoji and GIFs, all at once. It also has a sticker store, regularly updated with stickers for people all over the world.

But with thousands of emoji and stickers, and an endless number of GIFs, it can sometimes take awhile to find the perfect way to say “I love you,” “hooray,” or anything else you’re trying to communicate.

Starting today for all Android users, Gboard will use AI to suggest GIFs, emoji and stickers to you related to your conversation. This makes it faster and easier to share your #feelings and your glowing personality with whoever you’re chatting with. Keep your eyes peeled for the “GIF” icon to appear in the top left corner of Gboard. Tap it, and you’ll see a selection of GIFs, emoji and stickers that Gboard thinks you might want to share.

So if you’re typing “Awesome!” Gboard will suggest this sticker:

Or if you type “I’m sleepy”, you’ll get this emoji:

To make sure these suggestions are private to you and take place as fast as possible, this feature is processed entirely on your device. You can read more about the benefits of on-device AI here.

This feature is initially available globally in English only. Over time, we’ll expand Gboard suggestions to more languages, and more types of content to help you do and say more right from your conversation. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with this:

Gboard, Google’s on-screen keyboard, is a tool that helps people communicate exactly the way they want on a mobile device. Gboard supports over 400 languages, thousands of emoji and stickers, and an endless number of GIFs.

Part of helping people communicate is making sure Gboard is accessible for all people, and the languages they speak. One language not supported by Gboard, however, is American Sign Language. ASL isn’t a written language, so it’s not suited for a typical keyboard. However, ASL is one of the most expressive languages, and similar to other languages, has its own slang and regional variations. This makes it perfect for a visual communication format like stickers.

Ryan: How did you get started doing YouTube videos?

Jessica: I started my YouTube channel about two years ago. At the time, I was working at a coffee shop, and a lot of the customers would ask me the same questions about my hearing loss over and over again, which I totally don’t mind. But once I started noticing this, I began to wonder if there was a way I could educate a much larger audience, instead of just one person at a time.

Ryan: What feedback have you received from other Deaf or Hard of Hearing people on your work?

Jessica: I grew up being the only Deaf person I really knew, so I felt very alone and isolated. When I started my YouTube channel years later, I thought there was only going to be a few people who could relate to my content, but boy, was I wrong! I get messages and comments all the time from both Deaf and Hard of Hearing adults and kids telling me they can relate to my videos. Whenever I get these messages, it’s hands down, one of the best feelings in the world.

Ryan: How do you typically use expressions like stickers/GIFs/emoji? What do you like/dislike about this experience?

Jessica: I use stickers, emojis, and GIFs really often. Some might tell you, too often or, more-than-one-normally-should often. (Insert wide eye, straight big smile emoji here)

Personally, a text message just doesn’t allow me to fully express what I am trying to say, or how I am feeling. I probably feel this way because I am a very animated person. Whenever I sign or talk, I feel like I always need to use all of my facial expressions and body language to express what I am trying to say. Even if it is just something simple like, “Hey can you pass the salt?” it ends up being very animated.

Ryan: What was your vision for these stickers? How did the end product compare to your vision?

Jessica: At the beginning of the project, I had no idea what direction these stickers were going to go in. I thought for sure the stickers would feature one character signing all the words.

But after looking at all of our sketches, I realized I wanted a sticker set that would help spread Deaf awareness and expose American Sign Language to more people, even just a little bit. I knew that if we designed a character for the stickers who signed, only those who knew ASL would know what the signs meant, and those who didn’t know ASL might end up ignoring the set completely.

We settled on the perfect solution: making the words become the characters. Now, if you know ASL, you will understand the whole set, as well as the slang. And if you don’t know ASL you will still be able to follow along with most of the signs their meanings.

Ryan: Were there any challenges you encountered as an artist creating the stickers?

Jessica: A lot of people don’t realize that, in sign language, a simple change in facial expression or body language can change a sign’s meaning completely. Just like how a tone of someone’s voice will allow you to figure out if they are mad at you, or if they’re asking you a question.

So when I had a word like “No”, I had to think about what kind of “No” I wanted to sign. Did I want it to be a sad “no”, a happy “no”, a sarcastic “no”? Then, if I picked sad, I had to ask myself, “How sad is it? Is it so sad it’s crying or is it just bummed out sad?” There are so many ways to sign and say “no” that it was hard to pick just one.

Ryan: How do you hope people will use them?

Jessica: I hope it will inspire people to start learning basic ASL or the other many different types of sign language: Mexican Sign Language, British Sign Language, Filipino Sign Language, etc.

My other hope is that the set will encourage people to start learning about Deaf/Hard of Hearing history, community, and culture. People still have a lot to learn about Deaf people. And the faster we can all learn about each other, the faster we can work towards making the world more accessible for one another.