Google Caught Borrowing Rival’s Software

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