A Japanese man is taking Google to court. He blames the search giant's autocomplete feature for destroying his reputation, for his inability to find work and for ruining his life.

So, what exactly has Google done to this man? His lawyer, Hiroyuki Tomita, claims that the autocomplete feature in the search function has linked his client with crimes which were probably committed by someone else of the same name. He added that his client has suffered irreversible damage and not been able to find a job because of this function.

Autocomplete is a feature in Google search which predicts what the person may be searching for. For instance, if you type Google in the search box it suggests "Google autocomplete funny", or if you type in Australia, it thinks you could be looking for "Australian Open". It makes this assumption not by any manual input, or so Google insists, but by a clever mix of algorithms and stored user data. So, depending on what people have been searching for, it pops out friendly suggestions. However, this is exactly what the Japanese man is claiming cost him his job.

A Tokyo court has now issued a provisional order to Google asking it to remove some search terms from its autocomplete feature. The court's decision comes after Tomita argued that this feature was flawed as a whole since it had the potential to mislead people and give false information. He added that autocomplete could lead to "irretrievable damage such as a loss of job or bankruptcy just by showing search results that constitute defamation or a violation of the privacy of an individual person or small and medium-sized companies."

Google has answered by saying that the autocomplete results are spewed out mechanically and thus are not an invasion of privacy. This however, may not be entirely true. In 2010 Google did tweak the autocomplete feature so that terms relating to piracy did not automatically show up in the results. Also, the company does admit that there is a bit of manual intervention in autocomplete but only when it comes to "pornography, violence, hate speech, and terms that are frequently used to find content that infringes copyright"

The autocomplete feature has faced similar trouble in the past. Right at this moment, there is another such case going on in the UK against the search giant. Max Mosley, who owns a Formula One racing team, is suing Google for almost the exact thing. He claims that when his name is typed into the search box, autocomplete throws out suggestions about his private sex life.

In an eerily similar story Google lost a case in Italy in April 2011. This too related to the defamatory suggestions in the autocomplete feature. The unnamed person who sued the company said that the feature suggested terms that were defamatory, like "con man".

With yet another country berating Google for its search function, the company may well have to do some tweaking, and finally be forced to comply.