Google’s new Olympic doodle lets users jump hurdles, shoot hoops

London - Google’s interactive doodle has lead to thousand of lost working hours as people get busy exploring them during the office hours.

The latest doodle being the 110m hurdle race, one of the many Olympic themed doodles to come up on its search engine’s homepage after the games started.

The addictive mini-game, which offers 1980s-style nostalgia for video game fans, gets people to frantically hit the arrow keys on their keyboard in order to pick up speed, and then timing their jumps across the hurdles with a tap on the space bar.

It is the latest in a long line of Olympic-themed doodles, but the first game - and is likely to lead to thousands of lost office-hours as workers compete for their personal best.

Google is well-known for making work a lot of fun - employees famously are given 20 percent of the office time to explore their own pet projects, and out of that, staple Google services such as Gmail and Google News were born.

However, every time the company places an interactive doodle on its simply homepage, bosses across the world see their employee’s productivity drop, the Daily Mail reported.

This time last year, Google had created a guitar-themed doodle to mark the late musician Les Paul’s 96th birthday party.

According to website Extreme Tech, this doodle ended up costing a staggering 166 million pounds in the UK, as office workers took time off to play the interactive “guitar” - with workers spending a total of 10.7 million hours on the mini-game.