The table below lists the 10 most searched for consumer electronics products last week (which included the key sales days of Christmas Day and Boxing Day) and the week before. Searches for televisions increased by 148% last week, making the TV the second most searched for consumer electronics product after mobile phones. Shoppers are obviously taking advantage of sales discounts to purchase new, larger TVs – of the 10 most searched for models, four were 40″, another four were 32″ and two were 42″. The five most searched for TV brands last week were (in descending order): Sony, LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Toshiba.

The second fastest growing product type last week was MP3 players, which experienced a 45% increase in searches. The market remains dominated by Apple, which picked up 85% of all searches for a particular product or brand. For the first time last week the iPod Touch became the most searched for Apple iPod, narrowly edging out the generic iPod and receiving well over twice as many searches the iPod Nano.
The final big growth area last week was computers, which experienced a 33% increase in searches. The most searched for computer last week was the Samsung NC10 netbook, which has inched ahead of the Sony Viao. Another netbook, the Acer Aspire One, currently sits third in the rankings.
That’s it from us in 2008! Happy New Year from all at Hitwise UK – we’ll see you again in 2009, but until then I thought I’d provide a recap of our favourite and/or most popular posts from the last 12 months.
January: Facebook: 1 in 50 UK Internet visits
February: What happens if your site gets ‘blacklisted’ by Google?
March: Plural or Singular search terms?
April: How popular is Google’s “pages from the UK” search option?
May: Lolcats and Popbitches
June: Blog traffic reaches all time high
July: Twitter UK traffic: up 485% this year, 70% higher than USA
August: 9 in 10 UK searches are navigational / branded
September: Google Chrome – initial stats
October: The cult of Robert Peston and BBC blogs (Although I don’t agree with it, this post also includes my favourite comment of the year, courtesy of Guido Fawkes: “He is a cult alright”.)
November: Marks & Spencer and Debenhams sales
December: 133% increase in voucher searches
Thanks again for reading and special thanks to everyone that contributed via the comments box. As always, you can follow Hitwise UK on Twitter.