A former employee of the firm, Sanmay Ved  explained on a LinkedIn post that he succeeded in buying the Google.com domain name for $12. But he was able to enjoy it only for a minute, before Google takes it back.

$12 to buy the Google.com domain name? It seems like a good deal, isn’t it? That’s what Sanmay Ved had to say when he bought from Google Domains the domain name used by the giant search engine, curiously made available for sale on the platform on September 29th.

The former Google employee has extensively documented this strange anomaly in a post on LinkedIn. On September 29, he explains that he noticed on Google Domains that the Google.com domain name was on sale. Intrigued, he decided to buy it for $12, convinced that the system would prevent the sale from being approved, but he tried anyway. But it was finally considered valid and was registered by Google Domains, Google’s domain name sales service.

Sanmay Ved even had time to see the transfer on his Google Webmaster Tools console, actually accessing messages sent to the holder of the Google.com domain name.

But the strange and tasty episode did not last long: a few minutes after the validation of the transfer, Sanmay Ved received an email from Google Domains informing him of the cancellation of his last purchase, accompanied by a refund of his 12 dollars. In total, Sanmay Ved can boast of being for a short time the owner of the most visited domain name on the web. He nevertheless warned Google of his mishap, and the company says it is looking into the incident to understand how it may have occurred. A stroke of luck for society: Sanmay Ved says he is a big fan of society and has tried manipulation simply out of curiosity, without any bad intention.

The fact that he bought the domain name with Google services also simplified the cancellation of the purchase order. Sanmay Ved recalls the misadventure experienced by Microsoft in 2003 when an unknown had bought the domain name Hotmail.co.uk following an oversight of the renewal of the domain name by Microsoft, a situation that had lasted for several days, the time that Microsoft did not realize what had happened.