Google piad $12,000 to a person who owned Google.com for 1 minute

Photo: Sanmay Ved

Owning a part of Google, if only for a minute, has its benefits.
The search giant revealed Thursday that it gave more than $12,000 in reward money to Sanmay Ved, an MBA candidate at Babson College & a former employee of google who discovered an online error that allowed him to buy the google.com domain for about a minute.

 He bought it, charging the $12 fee to his Discover card, never really expecting the transaction to go through. But he was surprised when his payment went through and he got a confirmation email saying he was now the owner of the world's most-visited domain.

After the incident, Google contacted Ved and offered him a cash reward in exchange for spotting the unusual security error.

Google initially offered Ved $6,006.13 (that's a rough numerical spelling of "Google," if you use some imagination) under its Vulnerability Reward Program for bringing the bug to its attention. When Google learned that Ved didn't intend to keep the money but instead donate it to charity, the company doubled the reward. Ved requested that all the reward money go to the Art of Living India foundation.

The Googleplex headquarters complex of Google, Inc., in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, United States

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

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