The judge in the KinderStart case granted Google’s motion to dismiss without leave to amend:
The instant case has been intensively litigated for more than eleven months. Under these circumstances, the Court concludes that there is no reasonable likelihood that KinderStart will cure the defects in the SAC [second amended complaint] by further amendment. Accordingly, the motion to dismiss will be granted without leave to amend.
I believe the judge also granted Google’s motion for sanctions against the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney:
The Court concludes that the allegation that Google sells priority placement in its results should not have been made based upon the limited information identified by Yu [the attorney for the plaintiff]. As presented to the Court on this motion, Yu’s purported evidence is either double hearsay or hearsay speculation as to the “mysterious” causes of improvement in a website’s position in Google’s search results. Yu provides no evidence that would support KinderStart’s broad attacks on the objectivity of Google’s search results contained in SAC ¶¶ 130-31, 135. The Court concludes that the allegations are sanctionable under Rule 11 because they are factually baseless and because Yu failed to perform an adequate investigation before filing them.
I did a declaration in this case, so I’m not going to comment on it. I’m leaving comments off for this post as well.
