Is A Him Registered When You Buy It

Google.com, one of the most valuable domains on the Internet, was mistakenly sold for $12 last fall.

Google paid $12,000 to become it back.

The buyer was a sometime Googler, Sanmay Ved, who discovered Google.com on the list of domains available for sale on September 29. He bought information technology, charging the $12 fee to his Discover bill of fare, never actually expecting the transaction to go through.

"I was hoping I would get an fault at former saying transaction did not become through, but I was able to complete purchase, and my credit carte was actually charged!" he wrote in a postal service on LinkedIn last fall.

He told CNNMoney he fabricated the buy simply out of marvel.

"I idea at some point in time information technology would cake me out, merely I wanted to meet how far information technology would get," he said.

google homepage price — Google offered to pay $vi,006.thirteen to Sanmay Ved, who bought the Google.com domain for $12. It ended upwardly paying twice that amount to a charity he picked.

The transaction did go through - for near a infinitesimal. He said during that brief fourth dimension he got a flood of data from Google users, though he was not able actually modify the Google habitation page. Then he got an electronic mail from Google canceling the transaction.

Related: Will Google pass Apple every bit most valuable company?

Ved worked for 5-one/2 years at Google, according to his LinkedIn folio, and likes the company plenty to have its logo every bit his profile motion picture on Facebook. He is now an MBA student at Babson College in suburban Boston.

Google (GOOGL) admits Ved endemic the domain, albeit very temporarily. The visitor said that it offered him $6006.13, which is a numerical version of the word Google. "Squint a little and you lot'll see it," the company said in weblog post about the incident.

When Google learned that Ved didn't intend to keep the money but instead donate it to charity, the company doubled the reward. Ved, who is from India, directed that the coin be given to the Art of Living India Foundation. The group runs free schools in parts of that land where poverty and child labor are widespread.

Related: What we Googled in 2015

Google regularly pays people who discover security problems with its systems and notifies the company. It said the largest single award it paid terminal twelvemonth was $37,500 to an Android security researcher. (We assume that'southward a homo, not a humanoid robot who performs security enquiry. But given how strange and quirky this entire story is, who knows).

CNNMoney (New York) First published January 29, 2016: eight:xix AM ET