The nearly universal reaction to seeing Google’s playable 30th anniversary Pac-Man doodle was, “Well, there goes Friday.” Indeed. A productivity firm has calculated the time spent playing Google’s Pac-Man front at more than 4.8 million hours.

RescueTime, makers of productivity tracking and optimization software, looked at the average time that 11,000 of its users spent on Google’s pages on Friday and found it more than quadrupled. Normally they spend 11 seconds on a Google page, but on Friday they spent 45.

Google page visit time is very low, of course, because people find whatever they need very quickly and usually hit a link on the first page of results. To triple the time spent on a Google page means something else is going on, and in this case, it was chompin’ dots.

So what? Just 45 seconds, right? Well, Google also did more than 500 million pageviews on Friday. So RescueTime, assuming its user base was representative (and 11,000 is a damn good sample size), ran some numbers and came up with: Read more…

The Pac-Man 30th anniversary Google doodle

Google has become famous for changing its logo for special events, but it has never converted it into a playable game before. Today, it is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man’s launch in Japan with a version that lets you steer your pizza-shaped protagonist* around a maze that spells out Google’s name – at least for as long as you can evade the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde

To play, simply click the button that usually says “I’m feeling lucky” but now has the legend “Insert Coin”. However, if you don’t do anything, the game will start by itself.

If you click twice on “Insert Coin” then two people can play. Ms Pac-Man joins the game, with the second person controlling her movements using the WASD keys. Read more…