A Guy Bought and Owned Google.com for an Entire Minute

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SillyBilly299

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Apr 26, 2015
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Sanmay Ved, a former Amazon and Google employee, was able to buy and own the google.com domain, for a full minute, thanks to a glitch in Google's Domains service, currently still in beta.

As Sanmay recounts in a LinkedIn post, it all happened on Tuesday, September 29, when he was testing out his former's company Google Domains service, as a hobby, looking for cool new domains to buy.

Out of habit, after working for five years at Google, he typed google.com in the domain search field, and to his amazement, the google.com domain appeared to be free.

Thinking it was a bug, he went on through all the steps of registering the domain name, and was baffled even more to see that he was able to add the domain to his shopping cart, go through the checkout procedures, charge his credit card, get SMS notification of the credit card payment, and even receive domain details via email.

The buyer even got access to the Google Search Console account for google.com
But the surprise didn't end here. Along with the new domain, he also got automatic access to the google.com entry in Google's Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools).

Google realized what it had done, and just a minute later it initiated a refund of the $12 / €10.70 purchase fee, also letting Sanmay know he was not the owner of the most expensive Internet domain there is.

Something similar happened to Microsoft in 2003, when it forgot to renew its hotmail.co.uk, and also in 1999, when it forgot to renew the passport.com domain, also used by one of Hotmail's services.

This time, since Google is a certified domain registrar, it was able to cancel the transaction, and get its domain back without having to re-buy it from its temporary owner.

While this seems like a funny story for most, it smells like one of those modern-day marketing campaigns for upcoming services. Nice try Google! You didn't actually lose your domain, but we wrote an article about it regardless. Now everyone knows about your Google Domains service.
 
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