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The Pac-Man game that Google incorporated into a ‘doodle’ in the home page on Friday to celebrate the vintage video game turning 30, ‘Gobbled Up’ close to five million hours of work time!

Usually a Google doodle is just that, a doodle, but on Friday Google chose to turn its front page into a playable version of the game.

Nice to look at, but bad for business …..apparently.

The search engine giant reworked the game so the layout was arranged around the Google logo – The game proved so popular that Google has now made it permanent feature available on its site!

Tony Wright at the Time Tracking Company, Rescue Time, estimated that the aptly titled ‘Pacman effect’ cost businesses 4.82 million man hours! Time that could easily have been spent photocopying or making brews!

On a typical day, Rescue Time has calculated that most people conduct about 22 searches on the Google page, and each search lasts around 11 seconds.

Putting The Pac-Man game on the home page boosted the Google search time by an average of about 36 seconds (based on an average taken from 11,000 people)

Extrapolating this figure across the 504 million unique users who visit Google every day, this represents an increase of 4.8 million hours - equal to nearly 549 years!

“In dollar terms [because they are American] assuming people are paid $25 [£17.50] an hour, this equates to about $120m in lost productivity!” a spokesperson said.

Google have declined to comment on the potential damage they have done to the world….

To play Google Pac-Man for yourself just go to www.google.co.uk/pacman.