Google reveals how much it paid man who briefly owned Google.com

Google offered Sanmay Ved a hefty reward for spotting a glitch that allowed him to buy Google.com for $12

Google doubled Ved's reward after learning he was donating it to charity (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Google has revealed how much it paid a former employee who managed to briefly become the owner of Google.com due to a computer glitch last year.

Sanmay Ved purchased the Google.com domain through Google's own Google Domains service in September 2015, for the low price of $12 (£8.35).

He initially thought the listing was an error, but was surprised when his payment went through and he got a confirmation email saying he was now the owner of the world's most-visited domain.

His 'ownership' of Google.com lasted for around one minute, and he even had access to the inner workings of the site - but Google quickly realised the error and refunded his purchase.

After the incident, Google contacted Ved and offered him a cash reward in exchange for spotting the unusual security error.

Neither Google nor Ved ever said what the reward was, but the company has now revealed the sum in a post on their online security blog.

Ved's initial reward was $6,006.13, a figure which looks a little like the world 'google' if you squint. After learning that Ved was donating his reward to an Indian education charity, Google doubled the amount - making his total reward $12,012.26 (£8,400).

Google regularly gives financial rewards to computer researchers who alert them to bugs or errors in their services - in the blog post, they revealed that they paid out over $2 million (£1.4 million) to more than 300 security tipsters in 2015 alone.

Researcher Tomasz Bojarski was the most prolific bug-finder of 2015, spotting 70 bugs in Google throughout the year. One of these bugs, ironically, was found in the web form where users can report security flaws.