Well, this is just sad. I’m a big Google fan, and whenever people at Yahoo start to whine and moan about Google getting press for things that Yahoo already has (*cough* Google Finance *cough*) I always stick up for the poor billionaires at the Googleplex. But Jeremy Zawodny has a pretty blatant example of the Googlers ripping off a Yahoo ad campaign — for the release of a branded version of the Internet Explorer 7 browser. Here’s Google’s version:

And here’s the Yahoo version from back when IE 7 first launched:

That’s just sad. And while some commenters have tried to argue that Microsoft provided the template for the ads and therefore they look the same, it appears that Yahoo created the page themselves, and that the HTML code behind the two is completely different (Google’s apparently sucks). Lame, lame, lame.