When I write down the name of this post, I am actually pretty nervous because I have no idea how people react due to a great reputation of Google. And personally, I really like Google and think it brings u s so many wonders and make our life easier. So my point of this post is to see whether any people happen to know about it and what you would react if it is true.
It was a normal after school day and I was hanging out on a forum I usually spent time on. Then I found that there was a big debate about Google and another search engine famous in China, named Baidu . Baidu is the most famous and popular search engine in mainland China and it won the battle when years ago Google tried to move in China. However, this great company had a really bad reputation as most of people thought what it was doing is just mock Google.
Naturally, I thought Google of course would win this battle and most people are satisfied. However, I was astonished because someone said actually Google plagiarized the algorithm invented by Baidu’s CEO before Baidu is founded.
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This is such a shocking news as I never thought a company with bad reputation would have such great invention. Thus I kept reading and found what he said seems really reasonable and convincing. So I made a little research about this and this is what I found.
First, let me introduce the main character in this story, the CEO of Baidu, graduates of the State University of New York, Robin Li . In 1994, after graduation, he “joined the IDD information Services” and “helped develop a software program for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal”. And at this time, he was devoting himself to his own search engine.
Then in 1996, he developed the Rankdex site-scoring algorithm, which is the topic of whether Google plagiarize. And in the hyperlink I provided there, it illustrates as ” Many experts and commentators are unaware that RankDex was cited in Lawrence Page’s patent application for Google PageRank as the first qualitative search engine” . And the Google PageRank is exactly what Google use as for its searching engine, which is patented in 2005, 9 years later than Rankdex was patented. And here is the most controversial part, Google PageRank was created in 1996 when the founder of Google was still in Stanford and exactly in the same year Robin Li gave a speech in Stanford about his algorithm. And interestingly, the patent of Google PageRank actually wasn’t assigned to Google, instead it was assigned to the Stanford university.
Then in 1997, Li started working for a pioneer internet search engine company named infoseek, which had a great success at that time. And 2 years later, he went back to China and founded Baidu, which I mentioned before.
So from what I write above, Li is a really excellent programmer and entrepreneur so I think he probably has the ability to develop a great algorithm and Google plagiarize or refer to it.
So what you think if Google really plagiarize Li’s invention as it’s patented or do you agree with Richard Stallman, who we learned in former classes that this is a freedom of software that should be advocated？
P.S. I’m not so sure what Li invented there, but some people said he also patented algorithm of hyperlinks, so when you click the hyperlinks above, you may also be charged if he did ask for it? Correct me if any mistake.