Software firm calculates time/money burned by Google Pac-Man homepage

While Google Pac-Man has moved on to its permanent home at google.com/pacman, the interactive doodle lived on the Google homepage for a time on May 21st and 22nd.

As soon as it became apparent that absolutely everyone was addicted to playing a dinky little Google doodle version of the game, rumblings began about lost productivity. IT dudes emailed tech blogs about banning Google because it was proving to be too much fun. Mostly no one noticed because they were playing Pac-Man on Google. But according to the BBC, a software firm calculated the potential time and money lost when the game was live on Google’s homepage.

Rescue Time, the software firm that conducted the studies, said that on the days in question, 11,000 of their users spent far longer on the Google home page than is standard:

On a typical day, it suggests, most people conduct about 22 searches on the Google page, each one lasting about 11 seconds.

Putting Pac-Man on the page boosted that time by an average of about 36 seconds, the firm said based on the browsing habits of 11,000 Rescue Time users…

Extrapolating this up across the 504 million unique users who visit the main Google page day-to-day, this represents an increase of 4.8 million hours – equal to about 549 years.

The firm further extrapolated the financial cost of the cumulative seconds of lost productivity playing Google Pac-Man. Assuming workers were paid at a rate of $20 an hour, Rescue Time said the game could have cost companies $120m, enough to cover the entire payroll of Google for six weeks.