Did Google copy Chinese rival Sohu's input system?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 09 April 2007 19:06

Your IT - Home IT

Although Google has fought copyright battles with French news agencies and Belgian newspapers, the latest accusation that Google has been copying comes from Chinese search engine rival Sohu.

When typing Chinese characters on a standard English keyboard, an ‘input method editor’ or IME is used to turn 'pinyin', or Chinese characters written as they sound in English, into actual Chinese characters on screen.

Chinese search engine Sohu had unveiled their IME called Sogou in mid-2006, which rapidly became popular with users, prompting Google to release one of their own on April the 4th.

Unfortunately, much to the surprise of Sogou’s developers, it appears that Google’s similar system had allegedly copied much of Sogou’s vocabulary database, with even the names of Sogou’s developers appearing in Google’s IME, leading to Sohu writing to Google asking it to cease and desist, especially as the names of Sogou’s developers are not common.

Google refused to confirm or deny that they had used Sohu’s database, although it has been reported that Google has admitted to “leverading some non-Google database resources” which they are no longer doing, and are now using only Google databases which draw upon the zillions of search queries and results Google processes every minute.

Sohu’s request for a public apology from Google resulted in the following statement: “Apart from suggestions on product function improvement, Google also noticed queries on the dictionary, which in its initial R&D stage, was built leveraging some non-Google database resources. We are willing to face this issue of ours.”

The statement continues that: “While we apologize for the inconvenience this may have incurred, we have also adopted immediate actions. By noon Sunday, April 8, 2007, we have completed the second comprehensive upgrade (version 17 of beta 1.0) of the Gu Ge pinyin input system. The new dictionary is now based on tens of thousands of entries Google's enormous search database has accumulated over the years.”

What further action Sohu may take is as yet unknown, although now that Google has changed their IME system, the focus can return to what really matters: the quality of search results, no matter which language or input system you are using to search the vast resources of the Internet.