If you were one of those users who enjoyed the Les Paul guitar doodle on Google last week then you could be guilty of costing the world $268 in lost productivity.

A report from Extreme Tech says that the rest of the world spent 10.7 million hours pretending to be guitar gods by strumming the Google Doodle and resulted in lost productivity of around $268 million, assuming that the average Google user earns $25 an hour. The Google homepage doodle was posted last week on the 9th and 10th of June to honor electric guitar pioneer Les Paul's 96th birthday.

According to analytics from Rescue Time, 740 million visited the Google page and spent 26 seconds more on the page than they usually do. If you crunch the numbers, 740 million times 26 is 5,344,444 hours. Over two days that's a total of almost 10.7 million man hours spent playing with the Les Paul Google Doodle.

"It's impossible to predict exactly how many kilowatt hours were used by the Les Paul guitar, but if we posit that the doodle draws 5 watts, and the average visitor spent 26 seconds playing with the doodle, then each visit used 0.000035 kilowatt hours (kWh).

"Over two days, with 1480 million visitors, that's 51,800 kWh. At 10c per kWh, that's a grand total of $5180," Rescue Time said.

The doodle also cost Google some money to produce being a completely interactive feature which relied on a big Flash file for sound playback. Google would have paid a content distribution network like Akamai to serve the static files needed for the doodle. In reality though Google's peering agreements would have given the search engine a free pass on the doodle. In short the world wasted $268 million on a doodle that would have cost Google only $15,000 to make.

You can waste more time on the Les Paul doodle at its permanent home here: http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html