GOOGLE Inc today apologized to a Chinese portal for using the other's technology in a program that helps input Chinese characters on a computer.

The public apology came one day after Sohu.com, a leading Chinese portal, said Guge, as Google is known in China, ``stole its dictionary'' and threatened ``further action to protect its rights''.

Google's Guge Pinyin, launched last week, was found to share a lot of similarities with Sohu's Sougou Pinyin program which promotes its search engine Sougou.com.

The similarity lies in the dictionary of the two products, categorized as Input Method Editor (IME) software that enables users to write in Chinese characters by typing in their pinyin equivalents on the keyboards.

As users key in pinyin, the IME software draws on a dictionary of words and names to anticipate which characters the user may be looking for, and proposes possible matches.

Google said in an e-mailed statement to the Shanghai Daily that it did include ``some data source that doesn't belong to Google'' in Guge pinyin, without clarifying what sources they are, but added that it feels sorry for its users and Sohu.com.

Since Guge Pinyin's launch on April 4, there have been millions of online postings discussing the similarities, which include a bug that both software share when users keying in ``ping'gong''.

The result after doing that is the name of a Chinese comedian, while his name should appear only if users type in ``feng'gong.'' For some other multi-syllable phrases, they also share the same recommended characters, including names of several less well-known people that work at Sohu.com, which few of other IMEs offer.

 
Google said it has updated the dictionary twice to provide a better user experience. The 10-megabyte Guge Pinyin, which provides a gateway to Google on its tool bar that enables users to search from anywhere they are writing on the computer, is intended to help the world No.1 search engine to expand its influence and catch up with rival Baidu.com in China.

Editor: Yan