Google's playable anniversary tribute to Pac-Man gobbled up almost 550 years of work time, according to a study.

The playable version of the classic video game was put on Google's front page to celebrate 30 years since the launch of Pac-Man in Japan. The search giant reworked the game so the layout was arranged around letters forming its name.

Statistics on how many people played and for how long were gathered by software firm Rescue Time, which makes time-tracking software that keeps an eye on what workers do online. 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. The firm believes this is a relatively low figure because only a minority realised the logo was playable.

To play, people had to click on the "insert coin" button which replaced the more familiar "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. 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.

I wasn't too impressed by Pac-Man the first time around!

At least they're not all looking at cleverthingies!

The original was here