Google is one of those well known and widely recognized by its originality? I’m not sure, you judge it by yourself. To me the Internet (especially on the blogosphere) are more or less flooded with similar content and data everywhere, in order to achieve speedy productivity! Even no exception for Google. This time, Google is being attacked with an official statement, claiming that Google‘s Chinese IME (Input Method Editor) is stolen from the word bank of Sohu’s IME. Word bank is the software component that recognizes “pin yin” and convert it into the correct Chinese characters.
How did Sohu prove that Google copied their product? That’s the trick within the IME software, where there is a script called “ME fingerprints” that predicts and converts what the user types at once into the characters. And the way Google‘s IME does it for the word bank fingerprint of “zhao li yang” is exactly the same as how Sohu’s IME does it! A coincidence or simply stealing?
April 11th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
The “zhao li yangâ€is a employee of Sohu.
April 11th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Ohhh, that’s really a good catch for Google! Thanks Leon