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]

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