Ex-Google employee Sanmay Ved said on Tuesday that he got "one minute of fame" when he bought the domain of the world's most visited search engine 'Google.com' for a mere $12.
Ved is an MBA student and an ex-Google employee who had been poking around Google's web address purchasing service, Google Domains. He was shocked when he noticed that Google.com was available.
"I used to work at Google so I keep messing around with the product. I type in Google.com and to my surprise it showed it as available," Ved said. "I thought it was some error, but I could actually complete check out."
Writing about the experience in a LinkedIn post, Ved said he added it to his cart, and went through the transaction, with his card charged just $12.
'The domain actually got added to my cart as seen by the green check-box, and the domain appeared in my cart,' the Boston-based online retail expert wrote.
Ved said that he was able to complete the check-out with his credit card and even received two confirmation e-mails.
The confirmation messages also contained some private information that should only be known by the webmasters of Google.
The domain also appeared in his Google Domains order history and his Google Webmaster Tools was updated with webmaster related messages for the Google.com.
“Additionally, I started receiving notifications, for when ownership changed in the Google Search Console for websites that are powered by Google Sites,” he said.
“Quite clearly, ownership had been granted to me. Order was successful.”
But within a minute of the transaction, Google realized its mistake and sent an order cancellation email from Google Domains.
The mystery of this malfunction still remains as Google's security team and technicians try to determine if it was a computer bug or a single domain name renewal was forgotten.
