Google Reveals Amount Paid to Google.com Buyer

Google has finally disclosed how much they paid the ex-Google employee who bought google.com from Google Domains after the search giant forgot to renew its domain name.

Former Google staffer Sanmay Ved purchased google.com from Google’s registrar service, Google Domains, back in September. For the low low price of $12, he was the proud owner of the world’s most visited domain, although only for about a minute. Google quickly realized what had happened and cancelled the transaction. In a post on his LinkedIn profile (what?), Ved announced that Google Security contacted him and offered a reward, but never mentioned how much.

In their year in review blog post, Google Security came forth with Ved’s reward– $6,006.13, which has a slight resemblance to the word Google. Ved followed up by saying that he would donate the reward to charity, upon which Google doubled the amount.

Out of curiosity, Sanmay tried to register the domain last September. To his extreme surprise, Google Domains showed the name as being available. Thinking it was just a bug, he clicked through to checkout and was able to successfully purchase the domain name. Once purchased, his Webmaster Tools dashboard was flooded with messages meant for Google’s real web team, many of which contained internal and confidential information. Fortunately for Google, the domain could have fallen into worse hands; Ved took screenshots and forwarded them to contacts at Google’s security team.