Yahoo has just released some statistics for what they’re seeing from people doing searches with Yahoo on the iPad. The results are a little humorous.
According to this post, “the top searches over the last few weeks tended toward the thrifty and economical.” That seems a bit odd considering that the iPad is a $500 to $800+ device that, while possibly the future of computing, is hardly a must-have right now in tough economic times. eBay and Craigslist were at the top of shopping-related iPad searches followed by big discount retailers Walmart and Target, according to Yahoo’s data.
Other popular searches on Yahoo from the iPad include queries for the Netflix app, and one for Flickr (even though there is no native Yahoo-built Flickr iPad app yet). People are also searching for ABC, NBC, Hulu, Pandora, Farmville, and even Chatroutlette.
The data is also interesting because Yahoo isn’t the default search engine on the iPad — Google is. So these people are clearly going to Yahoo.com (or setting the search box to be Yahoo) specifically to search for something. Yahoo also reports a 327% increase in mobile searches for the term “iPad reviews” and 138% for “iPad cost.”
Back at the end of April, we noted that the iPad was already accounting for 1.18% of the traffic to TechCrunch for the past 30 days. In the past 30 days, that number has jumped to 2.42%.
