Google Pinyin

» see tools.google.com/pinyin as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

My keyboard problem in 2007 was whether the machine in front of me had a Turkish Q layout or an F layout, and whether the ı was going to come out as an i when I emailed it to somebody. That is the entire difficulty of typing my language on a computer. It is not a category of problem. Chinese typing is a category of problem, and Google Pinyin was Google's attempt to solve it for the world's largest desktop market.

An input method editor sits between the keyboard and every text field on the machine. You type the roman spelling of a syllable, the IME offers candidate characters, and you pick one, thousands of times a day, in every application you own. Whoever writes that layer sees more of what a person types than the operating system vendor does. Google China Labs shipped its version on 4 April 2007, with the pitch that Google's index of the Chinese web would make its guesses better than anyone else's.

Then the thing that everybody remembers about Google Pinyin happened, and it happened within the week.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the dictionary incident ~

Users started finding words in Google's dictionary that had no business being there. The names of Sogou employees were in it. Sogou, whose Pinyin IME already owned the category, said the dictionary had been lifted from theirs, and the evidence was hard to argue with: an internal watermark in a competitor's word list is not a coincidence.

On 8 April 2007, four days after launch, Google admitted publicly that it had used "non-Google database resources" and put out a revised build. Kai-Fu Lee was running Google China at the time and the episode became one of the standing items in every Chinese account of why the company never took the mainland. Sogou kept the category. Google's share of it stayed small for the whole twelve years that followed.

~ what it actually did well ~

The product itself was good, which is the frustrating part. It did full-sentence pinyin conversion rather than syllable by syllable, and it pulled fresh vocabulary out of Google's crawl, so new slang and new names showed up in the candidate list faster than in a dictionary shipped on a disc. There was stroke-count input too, for characters you could not spell.

The Android version arrived in March 2009 for Android 1.5 and did something that reads as ordinary now and did not then: it synced your personal dictionary between the phone and the desktop through your Google account. The words you invented on one device were waiting on the other. Sogou had the market, but the cloud-sync habit that every mobile keyboard now assumes was being tried out here first.

~ nobody announced it ~

Google pulled search out of mainland China in March 2010 and moved to Hong Kong. Pinyin outlived the retreat by nine years, but from that point on it was a product with no owner and no reason to exist inside the company. The last stable build, 2.7.25.128, is dated 19 June 2014, and a preview branch from January 2011 never went anywhere after that.

The site at tools.google.com/pinyin went dark some time in the spring of 2018 and the download page was gone by March 2019. There was no blog post and no deprecation notice, which is unusual even for Google. The installer itself stayed fetchable by direct link for years afterward, an executable with no page in front of it, which is roughly how the whole China chapter ended too.

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