Chinese portal Sohu.com cried foul when it seemed like a new Google tool was ripping off  Sohu's search engine Sogou. Google said sorry Monday in a statement that promised to "face up to our mistake and offer an apology to users and to the Sohu company."

The event is especially interesting since it's usually Chinese companies that get accused--wrongly or rightly--by Westerners of copyright and patent infringements. Google's so-called Pinyin Input Method Editor application suggests Kanji characters after a few phonetically-correct Roman letters are inputted. Sohu has a similar product for Sogou--and more importantly had it first. Apparantly users think that Google's app works similarly to the way Sohu's does, the end result being that Google took data from "non-Google" data souces.

Now, this could have been an honest mistake. Google searches the Internet and the best information it gets is from another search site. Then again, it's easy to see why Sohu would get mad at Google for presenting Sogou results as its own.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told me this issue probaby won't have dire consequences for Google--which in China already holds a weak second place to Baidu, an extremely popular search engine there.

But he notes that this further drives home the reasons why non-Chinese Internet companies--like Yahoo! and eBay as well as Google--fair poorly in the Middle Kingdom.