Re:On what do you base your judgment? (Score 1)

A Pinyin input method (like Sogou Pinyin or Google Pinyin) not only maps pinyin(a string of alphabets) to Chinese characters, but also prompts the user with most likely words or phrases following the character just typed. The accuracy of phrase prediction is the major metric for evaluating Pinyin IMEs, because it dominates the speed of typing Chinese sentences. To predict phrases accurately, people have to build a statistical language model, which is non-trivial work. It requires a lot of machine learning, parameter tuning and manual labeling. In principle, both Google and Sogou can build good models out of the huge amount of Web pages in their databases. As far as I know, Sogou spent more than one year in building and refining their model, while Google took it off the shelf. I think Google did the wrong thing.