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The guy who managed to buy Google.com got a huge reward from Google, but he gave it all to charity

Google Building 44 Lobby - Google Maps 2015-10-09 13-47-27

Last week, we told you that a former Google employee managed to buy the Google.com domain name via Google’s own Domains service. While Sanmay Ved may have only owned the world’s most-visited domain for just a minute or two before the Mountain View company caught on and cancelled the transaction, it appears at least some good came of this story.

Once Google acknowledged the mistake, they rewarded Ved with some unknown sum of cash — but the company decided to double the reward when Ved generously suggested it go to charity instead…
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Google now owns abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com

| ICANN WHOIS 2015-10-08 08-49-50

Apparently owning abc.xyz isn’t enough for the newly-formed conglomerate headed up by Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Thanks to a recent change in DNS registrant info, we now know that Google has (via DomainInvesting) acquired abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com, a site that was first registered all the way back in 1999…

Prior to Google’s new ownership, the domain was privately owned and wasn’t being used for anything. We don’t know yet — and probably won’t ever know — what Google paid for the name, but it’s likely to be a hefty amount if it was acquired after the Alphabet announcement. We also don’t know what Google will use the domain for, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see it redirect to abc.xyz.

Google announced the major restructuring of its entire organization just a couple of months ago, starting with the creation of a brand-new company called Alphabet, Inc., which is now the parent company of Google and many other now-separate divisions of the company. Previous SVP of Android/Chrome/Google Apps Sundar Pichai now serves as CEO of Google.