Big Search Engine Pissing Contest
Yesterday, I read an interesting post by Jeremey Zawodny in which he calls out Google for blatantly stealing Yahoo’s template for the IE7 download page and using it for their own, after changing a few branding marks.
Late last night/early this morning Matt Cutts posted an (un)official response to Jeremy’s accusation, apologizing to the Yahoo UI designer whose template was stolen:
I can only speak for me personally on this. If Jeremy looked into it and says that it wasn’t a template from Microsoft, I believe him. That would mean that the Yahoo! page was used as a template for Google’s IE7 promo page. I can’t say why someone at Google would decide to do that, but to the Yahoo! UI designer whose page was copied: my apologies. In my personal opinion, it sucks when someone else copies a page layout without attribution.
Matt quickly followed this up with a few comments and pictures pointing out how he imagines Google can sympathize with the designer seeing as how every move Google has made with regards to the design and formatting of their PPC ads was quickly copied by Yahoo (in addition to other PPC companies, I’m sure).
At the very end of his post, Matt offered this challenge:
Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already changed the page, but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.
This puts Yahoo in an interesting position - step up and admit that many of the ‘innovations’ they have applied to their PPC system were merely take from Google, or else sit down, pretend they didn’t see it, and drop the whole copying issue.
Good stuff - I love seeing point/counterpoint happen like that.
