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The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours

The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours

When Google launched its Pac-Man logo on Friday, we immediately heard amused groans in our tweet-streams. “Well, so much for my morning,” said one. “Google’s Pac Man logo just ruined millions of dollars in productivity today, nationwide,” said another.

Here’s what we all saw on Friday:

Here are two of the tweets we saw in response:

Given our repository of hundreds of millions of man hours of second by second attention data, we figured there’s no one better than RescueTime to tell the world about the cost of Google Pac-Man on that fateful Friday. Here’s what we learned.

The first thing to understand is that Google does not result in a lot of active usage, in terms of time. Yes, we all use Google. But a Google search only requires a few seconds, and we’re all pretty well trained to click one of the first few links. Add to that the fact that many people use Google as a navigation tool (“Googling “IBM” instead of typing in “www.ibm.com”). Nonetheless, it might surprise you that our average Google user spends only 4 and a half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views. That’s roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but next time you do a search, count to 11- it’s a long time.

This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.. Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low “perceived affordance” – they put an “insert coin” button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that. In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

  • 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)
  • $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.
  • $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our Pac-Man data journey as much as we have. Next up in our on our data-hacking list, we’ll be digging in to find the laziest and most productive countries and cities in the world. Where do you think yours ranks?

Hajime!

Vim Kata Number One

I am not an expert in Vim by any stretch, but I'm fervently trying to "get my Vim on" by getting my hands and brain to work together so I can ninjify some code. I used to do Shotokan Karate and the practice of doing your Katas - ritualized steps designed to build your muscle memory and understanding - seemed entirely appropriate to what I'm doing with Vim now.

A megvalósítás minőségének ehhez semmi köze nem lehet

Napokra lezárják az M1-es autópályát

2010. május 19., szerda 12:03 | Frissítve: 23 perce

Beszakadt az M1-es autópálya a Cuhai-Bakony-ér áradása miatt. A pályát napokra lezárták, Veszprém felé lehet kerülni.

Napokig zárva maradhat Győrnél az M1-es sztráda - közölte az Állami Autópálya-kezelő Zrt. szóvivője, mivel csak az ár levonulása után tudják megkezdeni a munkálatokhoz szükséges felméréseket. Winkler-Virág András hozzátette: a Győrbe indulóknak azt javasolják, hogy az M7-esen Veszprém felé kerülve közelítsék meg a várost.

2

8-O

Motion Induced Blindness


What to see

Below you see a rotating array of blue crosses and 3 yellow dots. Now fixate on the centre (watch the flashing green spot). Note that the yellow spots disappear once in a while: singly, in pairs or all three simultaneously. In reality, the 3 yellow spots are continuously present, honest!

What to do
You can use the slower/faster buttons to change speed. Disappearance persists down to surprisingly low speeds. [If there are no buttons on the right, please update your Flash player.]

You can use the larger/smaller buttons to change size. Disappearance persists up to surprisingly large sizes.

You can use the "back-col" button to change the background colour. The yellow dots disappear into whatever colour the background has.

The 'defaults' button at the top restores the standard settings.

Comment
According to Michael Bach, "Steady fixation favours disappearance, blinks or gaze shifts induce reappearance. All in all reminiscent of the Troxler effect, but stronger and more resistant to residual eye movements."