Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), the tech giant headquartered in Mountain View, California, lost control of the Google.com domain last year, when Sanmay Ved bought it for just $12. As a response, his order was cancelled and Google rewarded him with a very funny amount. The student donated the money to charity after Google contacted him.
According to Sanmay Ved, he was learning about the Google Domains interface, when the suddenly typed Google.com and discovered that is was available for purchase. He described the experience that led him to possess the most important domain of the world for a minute, in a detailed blog post that was published on Linkedin Pulse last year.
“I clicked the add to cart icon beside the domain (which should not appear if the domain is not available for sale). The domain actually got added to my cart as seen by the green check-box, and the domain appeared in my cart. I was hoping I would get an error at sometime saying transaction did not go through, but I was able to complete purchase, and my credit card was actually charged!” He said.
Immediately after processing the purchase, he got two emails from Google and he started receiving webmaster messages for the Google.com domain, in other words, the ownership was transferred to the curious student, who was learning about domains.
When Google realized it had lost the ownership of the domain, they sent him an order cancellation email from Google Domains, since the registration service is owned by Google.
On Thursday, the company led by Sundar Pichai, published a blog post saying that it had offered $6,006.13 to Sanmay, an amount that spells “Google” in numbers. Last year, Sanmay, who is a current student at Babson College, said to Business Insider that he did not care about the money and that he wanted to remark that people who find bugs are not always chasing rewards.
When Google realized that Sanmay was going to donate the money the company doubled the amount, that went to Art of Living India, an Indian Foundation dedicated to provide education to the slums. The college student who owned Google.com for a minute said that he was a proponent of education.
A similar situation occurred in 2003, when Microsoft forgot to renew its Hotmail.com.uk domain name and someone else purchased it. The new lucky owner contacted the software developer by that time, and he was not answered. However, Microsoft carried an investigation after the domain company The Register contacted it, to announce that its domain had been bought by a private individual, who kindly returned it to the company.
Source: LinkedIn Pulse