(felixthedeadcat)

That Pac-Man minigame Google stuck on its homepage Friday chomped up desk jockeys' worktime, sucking up 5 million hours into impromptu power pellet crunching and ghost chasing, according to data from software company Rescue Time.

BBC reports:

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.

How much time did you waste playing Pac-Man Friday?

Google Pac-Man eats up work time [BBC]