Rs 8 lakh for Google.com owner for one minute

Google doubled the amount after Sanmay Ved, who was the owner of the domain name for a minute, donated his initial reward of Rs 4 lakh to charity

New York: Google has paid Sanmay Ved, the man who owned Google.com for a minute, $6,006.13 (about Rs 4.07 lakh) and later doubled the amount when he donated his reward to charity.

Sanmay Ved. Pic/LinkedIn

In September last year, the ex-Googler, while searching Google Domains, found that Google.com (domain name) was available for purchase. He bought the domain for $ 12 and gained access to its webmaster tools before Google cancelled the sale.

However, the Mandvi resident (in India’s Kutch region) had said it was never about money and wanted the amount to be donated to the Art of Living India Foundation.

“You may have read about Sanmay Ved, a researcher who was able to buy Google.com for one minute on Google Domains. Our initial financial reward to Sanmay - $6,006.13 - spelled-out Google, numerically (squint a little and you’ll see it!). We then doubled this amount when Sanmay donated his reward to charity” Google said in a blog post.

Ved, in a post on LinkedIn, had said he chose his award to be donated to the Art of Living’s education programme which runs 404 free schools across 18 states in India, providing free education to more than 39,200 children living in slums, tribal and rural belts where child labour and poverty are widespread.

Google said researchers from all over the world, coming from countries like Great Britain, Poland, Germany, Romania, Israel, Brazil, the US, China, Russia and India, participated in its security rewards programme.

“Tomasz Bojarski found 70 bugs on Google in 2015, and was our most prolific researcher of the year. He found a bug in our vulnerability submission form,” said a blog post by Eduardo Vela Nava, Google Security team.

The programme that started in 2010 has seen Google giving out over $ 6 million in rewards. It said it has paid over $200k to researchers for their work under Google’s Android VRP programme launched in June.

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