Search Engine Optimization

Google's Pac-Man logo led to almost five million wasted hours and cost the economy about $120 million, an analyst estimated. Google apparently had about 505 million users on Friday when the Pac-Man doodle went live. The game took up 4,819,352 hours of employee time and cost the economy a whopping $120,483,800, said Tony Wright, founder of Rescue Time, which is a tool that helps businesses to measure how time and attention was being spent. 'For that same cost, you could hire all 19,385 Google employees. That includes Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin), right down to the janitors. You could hire them for six weeks - imagine what you could build with that army of manpower,' The Telegraph quoted from Wright's blog post. Internet users were happy to find the Pac-Man doodle on the search engine's home page. It was to mark the 30th anniversary of game's release. The game could be played by clicking 'Insert coin'. It was online for 48 hours before Googl...

Microsoft investigates Windows 7 'screen of death' Windows 7 was released in October Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating a problem described as the black screen of death which affects its latest operating system. The error means that users of Windows 7 see a totally black screen after logging on to the system. The firm said it was looking into reports that suggest its latest security update was the cause the problem. Reports suggest the flaw also affects Vista, XP and other systems. Software firm Prevx, which has issued a fix for the problem, says millions of people may be affected. Users have resorted to reloading Windows as a last ditch effort to fix the problem," the firm's David Kennerley wrote in a blog post. ;We hope we can help a good many of you avoid the need to reload." Unknown problem The firm said its fix did not work in all cases. There can be many causes," said Mr Kennerley. ;But if your black screen woes began in the last tw...

Twitter has fixed a major bug that saw many users of the service appear to lose all of their followers and friends. The problem began when a flaw was uncovered that allowed people to force others to "follow" them on the site. People who typed "accept" followed by a person's Twitter name forced the user to be added to their list of followers. The hack was quickly passed around the social network with many people using it to force celebrities to follow them. It could have easily allowed spammers to insert messages into thousands of accounts. Web flaw Twitter quickly closed the loophole but was forced to temporarily reset many accounts as it cleaned up the damage. The reset made it look like many users had no followers and were also following no one. "We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to 'force"' other users to follow them," the site said in a blog post. People were still able to use the service during the disruptio...