Google had to apologize today to Sohu.com, a Chinese rival. Sohu.com had complained its data were used by Google in a new Internet tool. in an incident that highlighted the intense competition in China's booming online market.
Sohu complained that Google's tool for input of Chinese characters seemed to copy from their Sogou search engine. The similarities had been pointed out by Chinese Web surfers after Google released its tool.
Google in a statement offered "an apology to users and to the Sohu company" but gave no details of what Google actuall did.
Web portals in China react quickly to competitive threats as they spend heavily on new search, entertainment and other features. Inputting non-phonetic Chinese ideograms is time-consuming. Any system that can be more effective will do best in the web site competition.
Google's tool, the Pinyin Input Method Editor, suggests possible characters after just a few letters are typed, and is meant to be an easier way to input characters in Pinyin, a phonetic system for writing characters in Roman letters.
Google said its suggestions for characters are based on data gathered by Google's Chinese-language search engine about the frequency of searches for certain words but Sohu complained that Google also drew on similar data from Sogou.
After the USA China has the second-largest population of Internet users, with 137 million people online. It is probable that China will surpass the United States as the largest population in two years.
Google and other non Chinese Internet players are struggling to adapt to a Chinese market where communist leaders try to control what the public sees and limit foreign ownership of Web companies.
The Chinese writing system adds a layer of complexity for foreign competitors trying to tailor their systems for Chinese users.
Google has market share of 21.7% in China's an dsits at No. 2. Baidu.com Inc. is the industry leader with 55.2% ( source:Shanghai research firm iResearch Inc. )
Yahoo Inc.'s China portal is third with 7.2% and Sogou No. 4 with 6.5%.
Google launched a China-based service, Google.cn, after its market share fell due to government filters which slowed access for Chinese users to its U.S. service. Googles new service excludes search results on human rights and other topics banned by the Chinese communist government. Human rights activists have criticized the service for this.
The Chinese partner that operates Yahoo's China portal announced in January it was getting out of mainstream search due to intense competition and would become a business-oriented search engine.
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