Not all that funny. (Score 2, Interesting)

Multiply the minutes lost by the number of people searching, and we're looking at _lot_ of lost time.
Someone else can do the calculation, but even at $10 dollars an hour, that's a lot of money.

The real economic cost of this also includes the lost reputation (good will) to Google as well.

I hope this is incompetence. It could be worse than that.