For much of the weekend people around the world have been playing old school Pac-Man on Google's home page.

The celebration of the anniversary was a cute one, and so popular that Google has left the game up permanently on its own site, but according to one company the game may have cost nearly five million user hours last Friday.

Now Sleuth is always highly sceptical of such studies. After all, someone taking a few minutes out for a quick break of gobbling pills and chasing aliens doesn't necessarily mean they were less productive, just that productivity was more focused. Nevertheless the maths on the news is interesting for what it tells us about how we use the search giant.

According to the data from the software company Rescuetime the average user of Google spends only an average of 11 seconds per visit, which sounds low but when you think of it is quite a long time for a search, given that most users only really examine the first page of links.

The addition of the Pac-Man game bumped up that average time by 36 seconds on Friday. That's not a lot, but a huge increase over normal use.  

"Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)," the company says in a blog posting.

"$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 - 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power."

25 May 2010