• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, October 29, 2024

Yelp's recent antitrust lawsuit against Google, which centers on allegations that Google promotes its own material in the search results, falls outside the law's four-year statute of limitations on antitrust claims, Google says in new court papers.

“The gravamen of Yelp’s complaint is Google’s 2007 decision to incorporate specialized results into its main search engine results page,” Google writes in a motion filed Monday with U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen in the Northern District of California.

“The four-year statute of limitations applicable to Yelp’s claims ran long ago,” Google adds.

Google's motion comes in a complaint filed by Yelp in August, several weeks after a federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled that Google illegally monopolized the markets for search engine services and search text ads.

Yelp claimed in its lawsuit that Google uses its market power in "general" search to give itself an advantage in "local search."

Yelp specifically alleged that since 2007, if a Google user appears to search for information about a local service, the company prominently displays its own content on the results pages.

“If a user searches for 'plumber San Francisco,' they will invariably first receive sponsored results, followed by Google’s OneBox results, and only then can they scroll down to see organic search results,” Yelp alleged.

Yelp -- perhaps hoping to preemptively counter an argument that its suit was untimely -- added in the complaint that Google's activity “recurs every day.”

“While this narrative begins as early as 2007, Google’s conduct has worsened in recent years ... and Google’s market share in local search services and local search advertising has steadily grown by dint of its exclusionary conduct,” Yelp alleged.

“With each new local search query and response, Google renews its anticompetitive conduct, harming consumers, competition, and local search competitors such as Yelp,” Yelp added.

Google says in its new motion that these allegations don't bring the complaint within the statute of limitations because they don't involve “new and independent” conduct, but instead focus on the “architecture” of the search results pages, which Google says has been the same since 2007.

Google also notes in its motion that in 2013, the FTC declined to bring antitrust charges over allegations similar to the ones Yelp is raising.

Former FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said at the time that the agency found that Google's primary reason for touting its own offerings in the search results was "to improve the user experience," as opposed to harming potential competitors.

"While Google’s prominent display of its own vertical search results on its search results page had the effect in some cases of pushing other results 'below the fold,' the evidence suggests that Google’s primary goal in introducing this content was to quickly answer, and better satisfy, its users’ search queries by providing directly relevant information," the FTC added in a written statement about Google's search practices.

Yelp general counsel Aaron Schur said Tuesday through a spokesperson that Google's motion to dismiss the case was “expected,” adding that Google was trying “to dodge the substance of Yelp's lawsuit by focusing instead on how long Google has engaged in anticompetitive conduct.”

“Google will do whatever it can to avoid accountability for its illegal self-preferencing in the local search and local search ad markets, which harms consumers and local businesses, among others,” Schur said.

Yelp has long argued to government officials that Google wrongly preferences its own material in the search results. The review site also funded a 2015 study concluding that Google's alleged self-preferencing degraded the results.

“Our findings suggest that Google is -- in some instances -- actually making its overall product worse for users in order to provide favorable treatment to Google content,” that paper stated.

Google said at the time that the study was “based on a flawed methodology that focuses on results for just a handful of cherry-picked queries.”