Google has been told it must pay $500,000 after a Quebec Supreme Court judge ruled that Google relied on an "erroneous" interpretation of Canadian law in denying the man's requests to remove the links. "

Google variously ignored the Plaintiff, told him it could do nothing, and told him it could remove the hyperlink on the Canadian version of its search engine but not the US one.

Then it reinstalled the linkin on the Canadian version after a 2011 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in an unrelated matter involving the publication of hyperlinks," Judge Azimuddin Hussain wrote in his decision issued on March 28.

The plaintiff was granted anonymity throughout the proceedings. Google has been ordered not to disclose any identifiable information about him concerning the case for 45 days.

The tech company must also remove links to the defamatory post in search results in Quebec.

Instead of compensatory and punitive damages originally sought -- amounting to $6 million -- the man was awarded $500,000 for moral injuries caused after successfully arguing that he lost business deals and suffered strains on his personal relationships due to being wrongly stigmatised as a paedophile.

Hussain described the plaintiff's experience battling Google to preserve his reputation as a "waking nightmare." Due to Google's refusals to remove the defamatory posts, the man "found himself helpless in a surreal and excruciating contemporary online ecosystem as he lived through a dark odyssey to have the Defamatory Post removed from public circulation," Hussain wrote.

The plaintiff, now in his early 70s, has the option to appeal the judge's order that Google may not release any of his identifiable information for 45 days.