Google's Pac-man ate 4,819,352 man hours

At a cost of $120,483,800

Last Friday, Google changed its logo on the search page into a playable pac-man game to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the classic game.

Now, an outfit called RescueTimehas done a bit of analysis of the happening and decided that the cost of Google users noodling about on Pac-man rather than doing proper work was a staggering $120,483,800.

According to RescueTime, the average Google user spends four and a half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views - roughly 11 seconds on each Google page view. 

The click counters then and found that the average user spent 36 seconds longer on Google.com on Pac-man day.

The firm turned to Wolfram Alpha to discover that Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. Taking the habits of its sample and extrapolating those across the user numbers, the firm reckons Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time, over and above the  beyond the 33.6 million daily man hours  that Google eats into on a normal day.

Giving the average Google searcher an hourly rate of $25 serves up a notional cost to employers of $120,483,800.

For that same cost, the firm suggests, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, for six weeks.