In mid-2012, Greenlight, an independent digital marketing agency, published a Brown Goods Sector Report that stated that more searches were made for Amazon’s Kindle and BlackBerrys than Apple’s iPhone (News - Alert) 4S.

In November 2012, Greenlight published issue 14 of their Brown Goods Sector Report. In this report, they found that searches for the term ‘iPhone 5’ made a spectacular 594-percent jump, whereas searches for the term ‘BlackBerry’ (News - Alert) dropped.

According to Greenlight, the term ‘iPhone 5’ was queried more than 4 million times, accounting for 34 percent of all Brown Goods-related searches in November. This is up from August's 673,000 figures.

In the case of 'BlackBerry', however, it seems that the opposite was true; Greenlight's data shows search volumes for the term totaled 246,000 compared to 301,000 in August.

As part of the Brown Goods Sector Report, Greenlight made an assessment of which brands, retailers and review sites were the most visible. This assessment included both natural searches and paid media searches.

The report was done in the U.K.

It appears that the surge of searches for Apples happened between August and November 2012. In August, Apple (News - Alert) was ranked in fifth place with Amazon UK holding the top spot. But by November, which is generally when everyone really starts to do their major Christmas searching, Apple took over the number-one spot with Amazon UK slipping to fourth place.

You can see the top 10 standings in the following chart:

Even though Apple’s revenue has not met expectations due to poor sales of the iPhone 5, it hasn’t kept people from doing a search on the iPhone 5. This report was completed in November and there was a lot of flip flopping between Apple, Amazon UK and BlackBerry. There have been a lot of changes since then.

Now that BlackBerry has launched BlackBerry 10, it’ll be interesting to see if Greenlight’s next Brown Goods Sector Report shows another flip flop or whether things will stand as they are.