• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 1, 2011

A judge in Ohio has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against Google brought by search marketer myTriggers.com.

Judge John Bessey in Franklin County ruled on Wednesday that myTriggers.com, a comparative shopping company, did not sufficiently allege that Google acted anti-competitively when it increased the cost of myTriggers' pay-per-click ads. "myTriggers allegations do not contain any specific competitor other than myTriggers that has been harmed by Google's alleged conduct," Bessey wrote.

myTriggers said it is reviewing the decision and considering its next steps.

The legal dispute between the two companies started last year, when Google sued myTriggers for allegedly failing to pay more than $335,000 in search ad fees.

myTriggers countered that Google unlawfully dropped myTriggers' quality score because the company's cost-per-action pricing model posed a threat to Google. As a result of the quality score change, the cost of myTriggers' search ads allegedly rose by as much as 10,000%, which myTriggers found prohibitive.

The price of search ads on Google typically results from a combination of the amount a company bids to appear as an ad when users query on specific keywords and on the company's quality score, which is based on the landing page's relevance to the keywords.

MyTriggers' case suffered a major blow in May of 2010, when it emerged that the company previously said in an insurance claim that server crashes spurred Google to raise prices. That insurance claim undermined myTriggers' contentions that its pay-per-click costs were hiked for anti-competitive reasons.