The search giant has been sued by London businessman Brian Retkin, who claims the US company is responsible for providing links to inaccurate or malicious information about him and his business posted anonymously on the internet.

Irish legal observers, and Google's Dublinbased legal eagles at its European headquarters, are watching the case unfold as defamation laws in the Republic are significantly less up-to-date than English laws on online libel.

The main difference is that internet service providers and online product providers such as Google have specific legal devices available to them under British defamation law and the EU's e-commerce directive, whereas in Ireland the laws have not been updated to take account of the information revolution.

"It's ridiculous because we're advertising ourselves as a knowledge economy and aiming to attract more companies like Google and Ebay here, but we're not giving them the legal protection they need in terms of defamation, " says barrister and digital rights campaigner TJ McIntyre.

The law lecturer claims there is a danger of Dublin courts attracting "libel tourism", much as London attracts so-called divorce tourism because of the reputation of English judges in awarding large pay-outs.

"Ireland's defamation laws are rooted in the middle of the last century, and even if [Michael] McDowell's proposed reforms in his defamation bill went through there would still be no mention of specific defences for online publishers."

The Retkin allegations are believed to have originated in America, where it is much more difficult to succeed in a libel claim because US judges have ruled that search engines and other internet service providers are immune from defamation lawsuits.

In Ireland, an online publisher could be treated as a disseminator of libel in much the same way as a newsagent can theoretically be sued for distributing newspapers containing defamatory content.

With Google linking to 11.5 billion web pages, potential financial damages in an Irish court could be staggering.

A spokesman for Google would not comment on the specifics of the case. "The company would reiterate that is has no connection or ability to direct or influence the content of web pages which may be shown as links within any given set of search results."