For one curious minute, the most popular website in the world was owned by a 29-year-old MBA student in Massachusetts. It was an hour past midnight, and Sanmay Ved was scrolling through Google’s own beta website-registration service. Before enrolling at Babson College’s business school, Ved spent 5½ years working as an account strategist and display specialist for Google. He’s a self-avowed “fanboy” of the site and often tries its new tools in his free time.
“I just wanted to see how the interface looks after you search for a domain,” Ved told The Washington Post. “And what’s the first domain that comes to everyone’s mind? , of course.”
After he typed this into the search bar, he was taken to a listing of purchase availabilities.
“,” “,” “” and “” were all marked by a gray sad face, indicating that someone had already taken those sites. Quite inexplicably, however, the emoji next to “” was happy and green.
He tried adding it to his cart. No error message came up. He tried checking out. Again, no error. And then his credit card was charged the $12 sum at which Google had priced its website.
“I was really shocked,” Ved said. “I thought, ‘Did I really just do what I think I did?’ “
With the purchase complete, Ved received two e-mails from Google Domains confirming his order. Yet just as suddenly as those messages came, another shortly followed. “Your order from Google Domains has been canceled,” Google wrote in an e-mail.
The world’s balance restored with a swift refund, Ved realized that he had owned for 60 seconds. But what a powerful 60 seconds it was.
“I could not change the homepage per se or give the site a new look,” Ved said. “But I had access to make certain changes if I wanted to — access to any number of changes that a domain owner would have.”
