Google broke its ‘do no evil’ motto and ran into trouble yesterday, after they were caught borrowing a piece of an application developed by a rival company, Soho.com
Google’s Pinyin Input Method Editor which allows users to input Chinese characters using alphabet keyboard and Sohu’s Pinyin IME software had some close resemblance with each other; this led to further investigation by engineers from Sohu. The original creators of the software had entered their names into the dictionary which was used in Pinyin IME. Their names also appeared in the dictionary used by Google’s software, which sent a nasty feeling that something was fishy.
Google quickly came up with an apology to Soho.com, soon after they realized that their engineers had used the part of the software developed by Sohu.com, however, the blog post made by Google failed to explain how it got into Googleplex. Soho is seeking monetary compensation, even though Google asked an apology. Can’t blame Sohu on this, Google should pay for what they’ve done. I bet someone is getting fired from Googleplex for creating this mess.
Via Infoworld

wrote, on April 10th, 2007
Thilak, you have got a typo in the rival company name… it is Sohu.com not soho.com
wrote, on April 10th, 2007
He he. Now big companies have started copying.
wrote, on April 10th, 2007
You may want to note that the company’s name is Sohu.
wrote, on April 10th, 2007
Google should provide compensate to soho and its the only way to compromise
wrote, on April 11th, 2007
Big companies always copied… “Do no Evil…”
wrote, on April 11th, 2007
[...] this is about the code that Google “borrowed” from Sohu. (News credit: [...]