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Trends in the number of weekly searches on terms related to the Palm Pre indicate that the "Now Network" advertising campaign by Sprint during the second half of May helped create early interest in the device, according to comScore.

The number of searchers more than doubled during the week ending May 24, coinciding with the YouTube homepage takeover. Interest fell somewhat during the falling week, but recovered in the next two weeks after the official launch of the device, with 267,000 searchers for the week ending June 7 and 361,000 for the week ending June 14. The final two weeks in June saw the numbers of searchers fall to about half the number of the peak week activity.

comScore notes this decline in Palm Pre search activity occurred with the launch of the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 on June 17 and the launch of the iPhone 3GS two days later. For the entire month of May and the first week of June, the number of unique iPhone searchers remained fairly consistent at around one million people per week. In the week before the launch of the 3GS, the number of iPhone searchers more than doubled to 2.3 million people during the week of launch.

The Palm Pre appeared to appeal to a different audience than those interested in the iPhone. Among the people who searched for Palm Pre-related terms during the eight weeks of the study, just 11 percent also searched for iPhone-related terms, indicating that the majority of people interested in the Pre have little interest in the iPhone.

comScore looked at the impact of the device launches on traffic to the online store locator features at AT&T and Sprint to understand how such intent may have been impacted.

The week the Palm Pre launched, Sprint's website saw a 42 percent increase to 137,00 visitors to its online store locator page, followed by a 41 percent jump to 193,000 visitors the follow week. The AT&T store locator page saw traffic surge 90 percent to 295,000 visitors during the week of the iPhone 3G launch.