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Interest led to almost 7 million queries in April

April 2008 saw 1.3 million people perform nearly 7 million searches for terms related to Apple's iPhone.

Plenty of interest in Steve Jobs' "one more thing," expected to be a 3G iPhone, spurred Apple's fanbase to reach for the nearest search engine and plug away in the hopes of finding some advanced information. According to comScore, those 6.9 million searches in April sent a clear signal.

"Search is frequently a harbinger of purchase intent," comScore senior VP Dan Lackner said in a statement. "The increase in volume of iPhone searches demonstrates just how heavy that interest has been for the next generation of Apple’s popular phone – even when its existence was still just a rumor."

Apple's next iPhone has a drop date of July 11. "Twice as fast. Half the price," Apple said in touting the new model, perhaps to the chagrin of those who paid a premium for the original iPhone last year.

ComScore Marketer noted iPhone, iPhone update, and iPhone web apps as the top three search keyphrases in April 2008. They also noted how people acted on those searches when performing them on the major search engines:

Of the iPhone-related searches that generated click-thrus, the vast majority (88.4 percent) occurred on Google search, 33 percent higher than one would expect given Google’s share of total Internet search click-thrus. All other search engines generated a lower percentage of iPhone-related clicks than their respective shares of total search clicks.

Such information should place even greater emphasis on search optimization for sites with iPhone-related content, as webmasters chase those Google click-throughs. Let's hope Google continues to be up to the task of culling the spam from the content as it indexes iPhone pages.