Google Plagiarises Yahoo!

Do these look similar to you?

The first screenshot is of Yahoo!'s IE7 download page. The second screenshot is Google's IE7 download page. Yahoo!'s came first.

Google has not only copied the structure of the page, they have also copied the majority of the text. Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny identified Google's plagiarism and within hours, Google had changed the page to look like this.

Google's Matt Cutts posted a piece on his blog but rather than simply holding his hands up and admitting what they had done, he turned it around and blamed Yahoo! for the times that they had copied Google! Sure, Yahoo! had copied how text ads appeared but there are only so many ways you can display a piece of text. Google had copied an entire page.

Comments

[Kirsty]

Maybe Microsoft provided them both with the template.

I don't know why anyone would bother with IE7, as it's still not as good as Firefox. For starters - IE's 'add-ons' are puny in comparison and what on earth have they done to the toolbars? The buttons are all over the place!

[Craig Borysowich]

These are actually ads produced by microsoft which have been customized to their target markets. Nothing to do with anyone plagerizing anything.

[Mike Nutworth]

Yeah, I thought that microsoft produced the ad and just allowed a bit of personalisation through logos and names. I'm sure you can find many other examples of this page on the web... So although this doesn't serve as an example of corporate plagerism, it's a good way of exposing rather unimaginative advertising...