Last week Apple and 02 announced that they had cut the price of the 8GB iPhone by £100 in the UK until June 1st. As always with Apple, the announcement generated a huge amount of media interest – including speculation that the launch of a 3G iPhone is now imminent. ‘iphone’ was the seventh fastest moving search term sending traffic to our News and Media category last week, and searches for the term reached their highest peak this year as a result.

The ‘virtual fashion game’ Miss Bimbo has picked up a lot of press - Google News UK was the second ranked site receiving up traffic from the search term ‘miss bimbo’ last week. The website allows users to create a virtual "bimbo" and compete against other players to earn “bimbo dollars” by making her as attractive and famous as possible. The controversy surrounds the activities the characters participate in, which range from partying and purchasing new clothes, to breast enlargement and weight loss using diet pills. The latter activity sparked so much outrage that the site has now removed the functionality from the game.

The Brit Awards take place tomorrow evening and there are three awards up for the public vote: best British Breakthrough Act, best British Live Act, and best British Single. The latter is tricky to analyze using search data, but I thought I’d have a look at the first two. The chart below illustrates weekly UK Internet searches for the five acts nominated for British Breakthrough Act in the weeks since the nominations were announced.

“Camden Town is burning down” claimed Amy Winehouse during her Grammy acceptance speech and, unfortunately, parts of it actually were. The fire that ravaged through Camden Market at the weekend received a lot of coverage in the press, and as a result searches for ‘camden’ increased by 250% last week. The top two destinations for searchers were the Camden Lock Market homepage and the Camden local government page, both of which experienced a significant spike in traffic on Sunday.

Following on Heather’s post, I wanted to share some UK data on the proposed Yahoo! and Microsoft deal. First up: webmail services, and as the chart below illustrates, Microsoft has a dominant market share with its Hotmail service. While Gmail (GoogleMail in the UK) has gained some traction, its market share has been flat for the last few months. Last week the combined market share of the Microsoft and Yahoo! services was 13 times that of Google.

UK Internet traffic to newspaper websites reached its highest level in over two years last week off the back of a number of big news stories. For the week ending 26 January 2008, 1.48% of all UK Internet visits went to websites in Hitwise’s News and Media – Print category, which includes the websites of national, local and international newspapers, as well as print magazines and trade publications.

Facebook’s market share of UK internet visits to All Categories increased to 2.01% in December. The social networking website accounted for one in every fifty UK internet visits in the last month of 2007, with its market share peaking on Christmas Day. As the chart below illustrates, Facebook’s market share has increased 10-fold over the past 12 months.

UK Internet traffic to the BBC’s iPlayer website increased 14-fold between the week ending 8 December 2007 and the week ending 5 January. The online catch-up TV service ranked as the 80th most visited website in the UK for the week ending 5 January 2008, having peaked at number 62 on New Year’s Day.

There a just a few shopping days left before Christmas and many people – most of them men - will be panicking about those last minute gifts. Vouchers are always a popular option and more people are searching for them than ever before. Whereas the earlier post focused on viral discount vouchers, the aim here is to understand search trends for more traditional gift vouchers.

We came across this interesting claim from John Lewis that it expects to sell more electrical goods to women than men for the first time this Christmas. In order to test their prediction, I looked at the demographics of our Shopping and Classifieds – Appliances and Electronics category for the last 4 weeks, as well as the same period over the last 4 years.

The Nintendo Wii was the most searched for product by UK Internet shoppers during November. There were thirteen times as many UK Internet searches for ‘nintendo wii’ sending traffic to the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category as there were for ‘apple ipod’, and over twice as many searches for ‘wii’ as for both ‘ipod’ and ‘iphone’. Despite shortages of the popular console in the UK, the volume of searches for ‘nintendo wii’ has increased 158% since November 2006, while searches for ‘wii’ have increased by 278%.

Following Friday's post on the top gadgets in the run up to Christmas, today I reveal the most searched for entertainment products. The most noticable trend is the massive increase in searches for entertainment downloads, which currently outstrip searches for CDs by a factor of 27 and DVDs by a factor of 13. Searches for downloads accounted for 35% of searches for entertainment products, almost double the amount for books, and five times more than games.

Disney’s High School Musical franchise tops the list of entertainment products, followed by searches for the Halo 3 and Fifa 2008. Hip hop superstar Kanye West is the most popular musician, receiving over three times as many searches as his rival 50 Cent