Google accidentally sold their domain name for just $12 and the buyer did something astonishing

Google made quite a costly error in theory when their main domain went up for sale for just $12 in 2015, yet they were thankful that the buyer made an astonishing move, offering a trade that you might not expect.

When considering the most visited websites across the internet, there's only ever really one option. Google has remained the 'king' of the internet for almost as long as it has existed, and it has had 76.3 billion visits in the last month alone according to SimilarWeb.

The company only recently revealed the number of searches it gets every single year and the result is staggering, and search data can often help define the trending elements of each year, including who the most popular celebrities were.

Being the tollgate of the internet of sorts, you'd have to imagine that the most powerful part of Google's enterprise is the domain itself - yet one critical mistake could have proven disastrous for the company a decade ago when it popped up for sale.

As shared by René Remsik on X, one former Google employee encountered a bizarre situation where he spotted the tech giant's primary domain go up for sale on Google Domains in September 2015.

Seeing it in the first place was certainly shocking enough, but the strangest part was the price - just $12.

Sanmay Ved had previously worked as an account strategist at Google, and he had enough smarts to quickly snap up the domain while others might have considered it to be a mistake or a red herring.

He wasn't expecting the sale to go through, but to his surprise he was suddenly in control of the most powerful website on the internet, yet Sanmay did what few people would in that scenario.

He immediately alerted his former employer to the error, offering to hand it back to them, and within minutes they made their response. Google proposed sending $6,006.13 to Ved for his troubles - which translates to Google in leetspeek, a internet-formed language.

Sanmay shocking refused to take the money himself though, instead urging Google to donate it to the Art of Living India Foundation, which helps underprivileged children in over 1,200 schools receive an education.

In response to his request Google doubled their offer, donating $12,000 in honor of Sanmay's honorable actions - although this is a fraction of what they'd have had to pay if anyone with worse intentions had obtained the domain in the first place.

It certainly would have been an opportunistic moment for anyone who wanted to take advantage of Google's mistake though, as one user pointed out on Reddit:

"If you owned Google.com for even just 45 seconds, the amount of traffic you could direct to another domain you own would be insane."

Others on X would have used the mistake to make themselves money where Sanmay turned Google down: "Cool thread, but considering everything, I might've asked for generational wealth to return it. If nothing illegal was being done it's called being an opportunist."

It was certainly lucky for Google that it was a generous former employee that spotted the error, because otherwise they would have had to have paid a lot more to grab the domain back, or suffered significant outage from a redirect.