google pinyin ime

Google China today apologize for stealing rival Sohu’s data for their Pinyin IME that was released a few days ago. The suspicion started when Sohu’s employees discovered that both of the input method editors share a similar thesaurus and have the same bugs.

After threatening of lawsuit, Google comply with Sohu and apologize publicly: [translated by Keith Chan]

We are willing to face up to the problem, and therefore would like to apologize to both our customers and Sohu.

Meanwhile, we immediately took action this week (April 8, 2007) at noon, We have completed the second update (version 1.0.17.0 ) and spent two days to complete the re-escalation of the current thesaurus. Currently, the Google thesaurus comes from the massive searchable database accumulated over the years produced by tens of millions of entries.

You have made a bad move there, Google.

also read: Shareholders To Vote On Google Censorship In China - Search Engine Land