Leading up to the June 29 launch date of Apple's iPhone, the volume of U.S. searches for the term "iphone" increased 583% in the past four weeks (from the week ended May 26, 2007 to the week ended June 23), according to Hitwise, reports MarketingCharts. Moreover, the market share of U.S. visits to the Apple iPhone website (www.apple.com/iphone) increased 185% in the same time period, Hitwise said.

Since week ended June 9, the Apple iPhone website has been the No. 1 site based on visits in the Hitwise Computers and Internet - Electronics category, which lists websites focused on electronics products and electronics manufacturers, Hitwise said.

Also according to Hitwise:

• In the four weeks leading up the release date, the most popular queries that contained the term "iphone" were focused on price, recent news, reviews and the release date.
• The search term "iphone price" received the largest percentage of searches outside of "iphone" and "apple iphone," at 4.23% of all U.S. searches containing the word "iphone."
• The top website to receive traffic from searches on the term "iphone" for the four weeks ended June 23 was the Apple iPhone website, receiving 54.44% of all U.S. traffic from the term.
• Following Apple was its wireless partner, AT&T Wireless, which received 6.52% of search volume, Wikipedia at 2.95%, Engadget at 2.80% and MySpace with 2.48% of search term traffic.
• The term "iphone" was the 131st most searched for term sending traffic to all U.S. websites for the four weeks ended June 23.
• The term "iphone" was the fifth most popular search term sending visits to the AT&T Wireless website for the four weeks ended June 23.

For the four weeks ended June 26, 32.22% of visitors to the Apple iPhone website were from users 18-24 years old, comprising the largest age group of visitors to the site, according to Hitwise demographic data.

For that same period, more than 54% of users to the website had incomes between $30,000 and $99,999, and 51% were male, according to the data.