Google Made A Terrible Pun Of Its Google.com Sale Goof

If you screw up and accidentally allow the central domain to your business to be sold to an outside buyer, you might as well make a bad joke about it. Google suffered some collective red faces midway through 2015, after somehow forgetting to renew its google.com domain and allowing it to be – briefly – purchased by someone else, but the search giant did manage to put a comedy spin on the solution.

The goof came in October 2015, when former Google employee Sanmay Ved was browsing – ironically – Google Domains and spotted the company's own homepage up for grabs. He paid $12 to register it, but a few minutes later the process was reversed and Google snagged it back.

At the time, Ved was offered an unspecified cash reward by Google, which was subsequently doubled when he said he planned to donate it to charity; in the end, he said, more than $10k was donated to "The Art of Living India", which looks to bring educational resources to some of the poorest people across the country.

Now, though, Google Security's Eduardo Vela Nava has revealed that the initial offer the company made was a pun all along.

"Our initial financial reward to Sanmay — $6,006.13 — spelled-out Google, numerically (squint a little and you'll see it!)" he wrote on the company's security blog.

That was doubled – presumably to $12,012.26 – for the Indian charity.

The payout was made as part of Google's ongoing bug program, which offers a cash bounty to researchers who spot flaws or loopholes in the company's services. While losing its own domain is probably the most embarrassing incident of the year, mind, it's not the only one.

After all, the most prolific researcher of 2015, Tomasz Bojarski, managed to find a vulnerability in the bug submission form itself.

SOURCE Google Online Security Blog