This week at the CES show in Vegas, tablet computers are all the rage with a number of new product announcements. With predictions from Forrester Research that 2011 will be ‘The Year of the Tablet’, we analyzed consumer demand for the marketplace in terms of branded tablet searches. Based upon a portfolio of the names of various tablets, interest has started to climb following the release of the iPad. Two early spikes in searches for branded tablets are directly attributable to the initial iPad announcement by Steve Jobs on January 27, 2010 and the release of the iPad on April 3, 2010. Searches are started to climb during the holiday shopping season starting in late October – early November, with another spike in searches taking place around Black Friday. The popular Samsung Galaxy tablet was also released in the US in time for the holidays, helping to drive additional interest.

Searches for the iPad dominated the results among the various products in Branded Tablets portfolio at 51% of all search clicks, which is even higher when additional variations such as ‘apple ipad’ and ‘ipad 2′ are included. The Samsung Galaxy tablet ranked 3rd for search clicks over the past 4 weeks ending January 1, 2011, also with two additional variations within the top 10 search queries. Searches for Android tablets also helped to round out the top 10.

With searches and consumer demand for the iPad high during the holidays, The Apple Store and iPad website received the highest share of traffic from the Branded Tablets portfolio. Retailers such as Best Buy, Amazon and Wal-Mart also received a significant share of the search traffic, suggesting that consumers were interested in buying tablets during the holiday season, not just reading reviews.