Google's web domain name was owned by a former employee last autumn for one minute until the company noticed that he had bought the site. The world's biggest search engine shared on January 28, Thursday how much it paid Sanmay Ved to remunerate him for owning the valuable Internet website Google.com, and the amount includes a geeky joke.

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Google awarded Ved an amount of $6,006.13. Leet or "1337" is an alternative alphabet for several languages that uses different combinations of ASCII characters, and is mainly used on the Internet.

In traditional leet the numeric figure spells out "Google." However, because Ved promised to donate his payout to charity the tech giant promised to double the amount to $12,012.26.

Ved purchased Google.com last fall from Google Domains for the rock-bottom price of $12. However, about one minute after making the bargain purchase he received a cancellation notice.

The former Google employee had been up late at night browsing the company's website-buying service Google Domains, according to Business Insider. Ved then made an interesting discovery. 

A green happy face showed that the famous domain with the world's most web traffic was available. This differs from a gray sad face that shows the domain name already has an owner.

Ved told Business Insider he thought Google.com being available was an error. However, he could add it to this shopping cart and complete the purchase.

However, Ved did not receive emails from the company informing him he had bought the domain. Instead, his Google Search Console dashboard received emails for the Google domain owner.

Ved explained that he also had webmaster controls for one minute. He detailed his whole experience and added screenshots to a LinkedIn post.  

Ved then received a notice that someone had registered Google.com already. It also refunded him $12.

Until last Thursday the exact amount Ved received for giving back the $78.6 billion domain was unknown. He had only shared in the LinkedIn post that the figure was very "Googley," according to BGR.  

It is unclear how Ved was able to buy the search engine's homepage. It could be a software bug in Google Domains, or the company had not renewed its own domain name.

In a similar case someone bought "Hotmail.co.uk" in 2003. Microsoft had not renewed the web address.