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A US student who briefly bought the Google.com web domain has been handed a cash reward by the search engine.
Sanmay Ved, an MBA student in the US, managed to buy and own ‘Google.com’ for around a minute on September 29 after an administrative oversight on Google’s own domains page meant the search engine’s site was listed as available.
The former Google employee then managed to buy and take control of the site, after initially only adding it to his cart to ‘see if he could’.
Now, Ved has been handed a ‘bug bounty’ by Google for spotting the error, and when he chose to donate this to an Indian education charity, the search engine doubled it.
In a LinkedIn blog post detailing the experience, Ved said he was browsing the Google Domains page in the early hours of the morning when he saw that the address had become available. He then paid the $12 (£8) to buy the rights to the name, and then began receiving emails confirming he was the owner.
Ved also documented how he began to receive messages from Google’s web administration team almost instantly as he gained access to Google’s webmaster tools. Around a minute later, an order cancellation email was sent to him, and his $12 refunded as Google realised their mistake.
The technology giant is yet to comment on the incident at all, and Ved has also confirmed that he won’t speak about the matter in any more detail in order to respect Google security.
It’s not the first time a major tech company has had an issue with a domain name; in 2003 Microsoft allegedly forgot to renew the hotmail.co.uk domain name. Luckily for them, when it was picked up on the open market an arrangement to hand it back was made.
