Chinese Web surfers pointed out similarities shortly after the release of the Google tool. “We are willing to face up to our mistake, and offer an apology to users and to the Sohu company,” Google said in a statement. However, it gave no details of what Google did, and a spokeswoman said she had no additional information.

Web portals in China spend heavily on new search, entertainment and other features, and react quickly to competitive threats. Inputting the nonphonetic ideograms in which Chinese is written is a time-consuming chore, and a system that offers more convenience could help a site draw traffic from competitors.

Google’s tool, the Pinyin Input Method Editor, is an easier way for a user to input characters in Pinyin, a phonetic system for writing characters in Roman letters. It suggests possible characters after just a few letters are typed. 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.

The Google statement noted that Web surfers have pointed out some material came from “non-Google data sources”. It gave no indication how much was from other sources or how it was included in the new Chinese-character tool.

-JOE MCDONALD