One of the most valuable domains on the Internet – Google.com – was once accidentally sold to a curious man for the price of small Big Mac Meal.
In 2015, Sanmay Ved, a former Google employee from India, discovered late one night while browsing Google’s domain service platform that the domain name was oddly listed for sale.
Ved, who had worked in ad sales at Google, noticed that “Add to cart” appeared next to the domain name and grew curious about how far he could go with trying to buy the tech giant’s domain. To his amazement, when he clicked it, the domain was actually added to his cart – confirmed by a green checkmark.
No error messages!
Confirmation emails soon started landing in his inbox, and he was given access to Google’s webmaster tools, which, according to Ved, “actually means ownership was transferred to him!”.
He searched for the domain name again, just to make sure he wasn’t dreaming – and sure enough, it was no longer available for purchase.
Sanmay Ved was now the owner of Google.com. For all about a minute. Google was able to swiftly cancel the order as the registration service used by Ved (Google Domains) belonged to Google.
