Apple is expected to launch a new version of its iPhone at the Apple World Wide Developers' Conference in San Francisco today Monday. As with all such events, the speculation amongst Apple fans and foes has almost reached fever pitch. Last week UK Internet visits to the iPhone website reached a new high. In fact, there were over twice the number of visits last week than during any of previous peaks, including the initial announcement, UK launch and recent price cut.

Looking at the latest search term suggestions report for ‘iphone’, 4 of the top 10 entries relate to an updated version: ‘new iphone’, ‘3g iphone’, iphone 3g’ and ‘iphone 2’. As the second chart below the table illustrates, the volume searches for each of these terms have increased significantly over the last few weeks.

The biggest recipients of traffic from these searches to date have been news and blog sites, which is understandable when you consider that no product has actually yet been announced at the time this was written, and everything at this point is still speculation. The Times newspaper has optimised itself well for these terms, and was the top recipient of (100% organic) traffic for both ‘3g iphone’ and ‘new iphone’. Interestingly, most of the traffic from the former went to the technology section, while the latter term performed better for the business section.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.