• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 2, 2015

Former Google employee Sanmay Ved, who casually browsed Google's domain name-buying service, noticed the tech giant's most-visited domain became available for purchase after the ecommerce platform added it to his checkout cart.

Ved, a former Amazon and Google employee, added the name to his cart. Bingo. The domain name appeared. "I was hoping I would get an error at sometime saying transaction did not go through, but I was able to complete purchase, and my credit card was actually charged!" he wrote in a LinkedIn post. 

In fact, Ved completed the transaction on his smartphone. The Discover card transaction of $12 for the Google domain posted to his account on Sept. 29, 2015. He even got an alert that the purchase was made on his card. 

Ved's Google Webmaster Tools dashboard was automatically updated with webmaster related messages for the Google.com domain, transferring the ownership of google.com to him. This is not the first time he has bought a domain name from Google, so he's familiar with the process.

Along with the new ownership details he began getting messages about the Google Search Console for Web sites powered by Google sites, but declined to name them in his post. 

While the purchase successfully went through, an order cancellation email from Google Domains followed the purchase email. The Register reported that something similar happened in 2003 with Microsoft's Hotmail domain in the U.K.