Saturday, June 12, 2010

Google Pacman doodle: A tragic loss



Most google users where took by surprise on May 21st when they were greeted by a very unusual google doodle.

Instead of the normal picture doodles, there was a fully functionung game of Pac Man. Google had chosen to make this their google to commemorate the 30th birthday of Pac Man, most probably the worlds most popular games. The game featured a yellow pizza shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun.

Google had recreated the original game logic,graphics and sounds, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. This was google's first interactive doodle. It was availaable for 48 hours on the google homepage.

Much interesting as it may seem, it brought about a large loss on working time all around the world. Statistics shows that, an average user spent 36 seconds more on google.com.

That translates to 4,819,352 hours of time the Pac Man doodle stole from the google users. This time is in addition to the 33.6 Million hours of visits they get.
This much time is equivalent to $120,483,800, if the average google user is worth $25 an hour.

This money would be enough to pay all the google employees ( all the 19,835 of them), right from the owners Larry and Sergey, down to their sweepers for straight 6 week.

Yes thats what google stole from the world economy by simply integrating a Pac Man doodle on its home page.

And word has also been out that this also resulted in confusion among many google users, who even contacted google customer care asking if they could disable it from their homepage.

Evan though the doodle has been removed from the google home page, you can play it here.

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