Google reveals how much it paid the guy who bought Google.com for 1 minute -- and it's hysterical
In October, researcher and ex-Googler Sanmay Ved made headlines when he managed to buy the "Google.com" domain for one minute.
Ved thought he was just being cute, but Google decided to give Ved a financial reward anyway. At the time, Ved declined to share how much Google awarded him, telling Business Insider only that it was "more than 10,000."
In a blog post Thursday, Google spilled the beans.
"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 wrote.
That's right: Ved's reward was a silly number-based game. As Google notes here, Ved ended up giving his winnings to the educational charity The Art of Living India.
Google has played these kinds of number games before. In 2015, Google parent company Alphabet bought back a bunch of stock for $5,099,019,513.59 -- the square root of 26, the number of letters in the alphabet, times a billion. In 2011, Google bid $3.14159 billion, or pi billion dollars, for Nortel patents.
That blog post was intended to share the results of Google's bug bounty program, where it pays cash to hackers for finding flaws in the search giant's services. Google says it paid out $2 million last year to more than 300 hackers and security researchers.
Another funny story from that blog post: The most prolific Google bug bounty hunter of the year, Tomasz Bojarski, was paid out an award because he found a security flaw in Google's web form to report security flaws.
Related: Google's recent projects.
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