Obama smashes web traffic records

Barack Obama's inauguration prompted record online traffic figures

The inauguration of US president Barack Obama caused online traffic figures to soar to new records, according to Yahoo.

The company said that the event sparked a flood of traffic that saw record numbers of visitors and page views.

Neeraj Khemlani, vice president and general manager for Yahoo News, said in a blog post that the site received more than 329 million page views from 12.3 million unique visitors over the course of the event, the highest ever for Yahoo's news site.

Previous records for page views and unique visitors were set in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Katrina, said Khemlani.

Flickr also saw a record turnout. Yahoo, which owns the photo site, estimated that roughly 150,000 new photos were uploaded to the service tagged with terms relating to the inauguration. Users also viewed more photos of the event, each visitor averaging about 70 photo views.

Search engines also worked overtime on inauguration day. Among the most popular topics were the text for the oath of office, which was botched by Obama and Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts.

Information on singer Aretha Franklin, who performed at the event, was also a hot topic.

Other popular queries were for information on reverend Joseph Lowry, and searches for the reason behind outgoing vice president Dick Cheney's use of a wheelchair at the inauguration.