Having just ordered our laptop from Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative, I wanted to check Hitwise data to assess popularity of the project. Last week, there were more than two and a half times more US Internet searches for “one laptop per child” than for “laptop”. It was the top search term that included the word “laptop” last week though it still trailed the higher volume search term “laptops”.

To put this into further context, there were more searches for “one laptop per child” than for “paris hilton” or “george clooney” but fewer than for “britney spears”.
When we bought our laptop, we started our journey using the query “$100 dollar laptop” but searches for variations of “$100 laptop” were much lower than “one laptop per child”.
US Internet users seem eager to participate. The top website visited after laptop.org last week was laptopfoundation.org - to which the “participate” link leads from laptop.org. Last week, laptop.org ranked 50th in the Computer – Hardware category, up from 89 the week before and 128 two weeks ago.
With one more week to go to participate, I’ll continue to watch these websites closely.