Google Blatently copies Yahoo page design – What the goo!
Author: Joe Whyte
Today I was searching on Jeremy Z’s blog who is considered a yahoo spokesman and I found a very shocking post. Basically yahoo created a page for a internet explorer download for IE7 and recently Google straight up stole the design and page copy. In the webmaster world this is considered horrendously unethical and the fact that Google would do such a thing is very unlike them. Matt Cutts posted a reply to Jeremy’s blog and proclaimed shock that anyone from Google would do such a thing.
Here is what the yahoo page looked like:
Here is what Google’s page looked like:
Currently Google has removed the page and replaced it with a newer updated version as of today. I’m curious to hear what people have to say about this as I know google is very strict on copyright infringement and is now treading the line very closely themselves.
December 12th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Are sure this isn’t Microsoft Ad copy (look and feel by the advertising agency) that is distributed with options for localization?
December 12th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Isn’t it possible the copywriting came from the IE7 team? They have partnerships with both Yahoo! and Google so this wouldn’t be far fetched (I’ve seen this type of thing happen before).
But even if that’s not the case calling it “horrendously unethical” and “very shocking” is a stretch. I know, it’s fun to catch the big boys in these ‘gotcha’ moments. Just don’t forget that good companies make mistakes and then recover to do things better.
December 12th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Jeremey (spokesperson from yahoo) said that there was no template from Microsoft and that Yahoo! created the page itself then subsequently, Google copied the page almost to the “T”.
When sites are copied and reduplicated then usually an email can be sent to their hosting company or registrar to take down the duplicated site design and if a site owner has a legal team then legal ramifications can be implicated as well. Many companies go through this all the time. The fact that Google took a site design from a leading competitor with full knowledge of the repercussions is pretty shocking to me.
Google is strong and this will not affect them of course but its always fun to catch them in these situations.
December 17th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
this Jeremey guy might say that but it’s still somewhat possible it was just a generic design template issued from Microspoof to get the major search engines to help move all those who haven’t been sucked into Firefox to IE7. there’s not a whole lot of proof except the “he said, she said” argument.
if Google really did copy an original design though from Yahoo….well….that’s just ridiculous. Google really seems to enjoy pushing people’s buttons (book authors, various govt’s, and now competeing search engines)