More than 2.5 billion euros. That’s how much the internet giant Google is worth, a company that encompasses not only search engines, email or YouTube. To this we must add Android, Waze and the Nest and Pixel devices, among others. Therefore, it is understandable the surprise of Ved Sanmay, a former Google employee, when playing with the Google Domains page (where the internet domains for sale are registered) discovered that he could buy Google.com. And for just 12 dollars.
Thinking it would be a mistake and that he had nothing much to lose, Ved pulled out his bank card and made the transaction… expecting it would take him to a page with an error. But it didn’t. “I thoughtand that it was about somethingorn error, but I was actually able to complete the payment – Ved explained in an interview -. I added it to my shopping cart and surprisingly the transaction went through.”.
From that moment on, instead of receiving an email confirming the purchase, your Google Search Console panel was updated with the messages that the owner of the Google.com domain would receive. As if this were not enough, also received emails with internal information.
“The scary thing was that I had access to the webmaster controls for a minute,” Ved added. Fortunately, he took screenshots and detailed the entire experience in a Linkedin post. All of this alerted Google to what was happening and he soon canceled the sale, saying that someone had registered the site before he could, and He refunded Ved the $12 he had already been charged..
But there is more. According to the online security blog of Google, the internet giant He initially offered Ved $6,006.13, a figure that is not random.: It’s like writing Google with numbers. The company then doubled the amount to $12,000 when they learned that Ved had decided to donate his reward to charity. Ved is not sure what happened to allow him to buy the site. It could have been a mistake at Google Domains or the company simply failed to renew your domain name when the time came.
Google is not the first to have domain problems. In 2003, Microsoft was unable to renew its web address “Hotmail.co.uk” and someone else bought it. While in Google’s case it was bought from Google itself and quickly cancelled, Microsoft had to ask the buyer to return it. While Ved’s control over Google.com may have been fleeting, he’s still surprised that his late-night search led him to buy the site. He’s been a fan of the company since he worked there for five and a half years. “I can not avoid the feeling that I actually own Google.com”, concludes Ved.