The Aussie man suing tech giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo

A Brisbane man is in a $4 million battle with tech giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Photo / Getty Images

A Brisbane businessman is taking on the might of the world's largest search engine giants and believes he is the first in the world to sue Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Jarrod Sierocki is suing them for defamation, angry that the company's search engine results produce links to false and slanderous comments made about him.

Sierocki previously filed a lawsuit against Google, which remains before the courts, and has now added complaints against Microsoft (owner of Bing.com) and Yahoo (including sites owned by Seven West Media) in a bid to wipe the internet free of slurs made against him by a disgruntled ex-business partner deemed to defamatory by the Queensland Supreme Court.

In 2015, Sierocki and his business was awarded A$260,000 ($284,386) and A$37,788 interest when he successfully sued a former associate and ex-client for defamation for comments he made on US site ripoffreport.com.

But he says he never received any money from the ex-associate who claimed bankruptcy. Despite the court's ruling the material hasn't been taken down and at the time of writing the page can easily be found via a Google search.

Speaking to the ABC, he lamented Google's inaction over removing links to the page from its search results, calling it an "absolute travesty".

"We've got orders from the court, why don't they just pull it down?" he said.

"You know it's false, you know it's a lie. Why are you continuing to publish it?"

Sierocki says he wants to see all the links taken down from the internet before his kids grow up and are able to surf the web and find them themselves.

In total, the legal claims against the search engine companies are reportedly worth about A$4 million, the ABC reported.

In what's been a near six-year battle, Sierocki previously told News Corp Australia that he sent eight emails to Google between 2013 and 2015 and served his claim, notifying the global internet business of material defamatory of him.

The controversial US site ripoffreport.com has ignored the Queensland Supreme Court ruling which placed a permanent injunction on the material. The court ruled that the post by Sierocki's former associate falsely claimed he was dishonest and involved in scamming clients.

Google — which this week vowed to fight a mammoth A$6.8 billion fine handed down by the European Union for breaking antitrust laws — is defending the defamation suit and has previously declined to comment.

It's not the first time an Australian citizen has fought to take the tech giant to court over its search results with a recent result in the Australian High Court bolstering Sierocki's confidence in taking on the powerful company.

Last month, a Victorian man scored a major win in his fight against Google after the High Court gave him the green light to sue the search engine giant for defamation following a protracted legal battle.

Milorad "Michael" Trkulja was shot in the back in a Melbourne restaurant in 2004 during a period when a series of underworld killings took place across the city.

In 2012, he successfully argued in the Victorian Supreme Court that Google defamed him by publishing photos of him that wrongly linked him to some of Melbourne's most notorious underworld figures.

Arguing in court in March, Trkulja's lawyer claimed Google searches for "Melbourne criminal underworld photos" produced results that included his client alongside photos of notorious crime figures like Carl Williams, Chopper Reid, Mario Condello and Mark and Jason Moran.

Trkulja also claimed defamation around Google's "autocomplete" options for his name which offer potential search suggestions before the user has finished typing. For Trkulja the suggestions included phrases like "is a former hit man", "criminal" and underworld".