Google bows to China apology demand

Admits to using Sohu.com’s typing technology in latest product

[bobothecat]

Google Inc., which is seeking to broaden its presence in China, on Monday apologized to Internet users and Sohu.com Inc., one of the country's major Web portals for using third-party technology in its latest product rollout.

[msnbc.msn.com...]

[bill]

Google China has admitted to borrowing some IME technology from rival Sohu:

Google apologizes to Chinese search co. [news.yahoo.com]
BEIJING - Google Inc. apologized Monday following complaints the U.S. search company's new Internet tool for inputting Chinese characters incorporated data from a Chinese rival.
...
Google's new Pinyin Input Method Editor tool is meant to help a user input characters in Pinyin, a phonetic system for writing characters in Roman letters. It suggests possible characters after just a few letters are typed.

Sohu.com Inc. complained Sunday that the new software appeared to copy material from Sohu's Sogou search engine. Chinese Web surfers pointed out similarities shortly after the release of the Google tool.

[edited by: Woz at 12:45 pm (utc) on April 10, 2007]
[edit reason] Tidying Up [/edit]

[decaff]

With so many development projects being done simultaneaously at Google...it's certainly possible for this type of "error" to happen...
At least they are big enough (Oh yes....Google is certainly "big enough" ;-) .. to admit the error and work to keep their China relations on good ground..

[59box]

It seems like this is not the first time that Google is copying competitor...

[jeremy.zawodny.com...]

The giant losing its innovativeness?