Pierluigi Paganini
October 01, 2015
This story is amazing and difficult to believe …. an individual managed to buy the Google.com domain and now I’ll tell you how.
The guy is Sanmay Ved, a former Google employee that currently works for Amazon. Sanmay Ved was searching for available .com domains when he made a shocking discovery, the Google.com was “available” for purchase.
“A strange thing happened at 1:20 AM Eastern Time on Tuesday, September 29. I was learning more about the Google Domains interface, and typed google.com and clicked search domains. To my surprise, Google.com was showing as available!” explained Ved.
Sanmay Ved, an ex-Google employee and current-Amazon employee, experienced something of a shock when he found that the world’s largest search engine website, Google.com, was “available” for purchase.
How much is it? Just $12 to buy the domain of the search engine giant.
He wary went ahead trying to complete the purchase, certain that it was a mistake. He added the Google.com domain to the shopping cart and completed the payment. The purchase was successfully completed and he and he became the new owner of the domain.
In a few seconds his inbox and Google Webmaster Tools were flooded with webmaster related messages that were confirming the ownership for the Google.com domains, a scary circumstance if we consider that Ved had access to webmaster controls for a minute.
“As soon as I completed purchase, I received two emails, one from [email protected], and one from [email protected], which is not the norm when you book domains via Google Domains as I have booked new, previously un-registered domains before, and I have never received emails from the above aliases on booking the domains. I will not share the contents of the emails here given they relate to the Google.com domain. The domain also successfully appeared in my Google Domains order history.
Additionally, my Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools) was auto-updated with webmaster related messages for the Google.com domain which actually means ownership was transferred to me! One gets the below messages in Search Console only for those domains for which one is the verified admin/verified owner (of course access was removed when domain was taken back by Google).” Ved said. “The scary part was I had access to the webmaster controls for a minute,”
Just a few minutes and the dream vanished, Ved received an order cancellation email and was refunded by Google Domains.
How is it possible? Google owns Google Domains and this means that the company manage all purchases of domains and it could revoke them if needed.
At the time I was writing there are no news regarding the “incident,” someone speculates that Google simply has forgotten to renew the Google.com domain, other believe that there is a bug in Google Domains.
Ved has published a blog post describing the entire story and publishing the screenshots of the process.
Ved reported the incident to Google Security and the company has acknowledged it.
That’s incredible!
(Security Affairs – Google.com domain, ownership)
