David Beckham

Well, our internal statistics for 2007 are finally tallied and we have some interesting data and insights about our work.

Most people who stumble upon our site are not looking for articles on politics. It seems like most are trolling for a sexual thrill --or so it seems by the keywords and phrases people have used to stumble upon our site.

I used to think it was funny but after years of looking at the site's stats and knowing that we don't write pornography, all I can think of is that the search engines definition of "optimization" is what we would call in the real world (and if we were talking about real people), plain and simple prejudice.

Search engines (and I am mostly referring here to Google), have decided that this site deals with a certain kind of material and thusly pushes our content up the top of pages that they have decided to have our site ranked in "with prejudice". Meaning that, the better our ranking in a search page, the more prejudiced or biased the search bot learns to be towards our site.

I am not one to believe that software, especially software that presumes to mimick human thought processes (but only faster) are above malice. After all, code and the software that is created with it is the product of the human mind. It is just another form of expression, another language.

Searchbots are meant to find pages relevant to the strings of text "fed" to them by web surfers. At no point are they meant to make sense of the search string based on the context of a site.

I could go on forever on this one and will eventually.

In the end, what I find incredibly interesting about these search strings is that, especially when there are several strings "tied for the same ranking", when read together, they sound like really bad emo poems.

The top 10 rankings for search keywords and/or phrases

David Beckham, once considered one of the best soccer (football) players in the world was told yesterday by his club, Real Madrid, that his contract would not be renewed. The news had been expected for weeks. Beckham has lost something in his step. He's not as fast as he used to be, and there has been much criticism that Becks doesn't seem to take the game as seriously as he once did.

So, what was the solution?

Go to Los Angeles.

The 31-year-old former England captain will sign a five-year contract worth as much as $250 million, according to Sky Sports. He'll join the Major League Soccer team in August, Beckham said in a statement today.

Beckham, acquired from Manchester United partly to help increase Madrid's merchandise sales, will play out the end of his career in the U.S. Since he and his England team exited in the quarterfinals of last year's World Cup, Beckham lost his place in the national team and has failed to secure a regular first-team berth at Madrid following Fabio Capello's appointment as coach.

If you have never seen David Beckham take a free kick, you have missed a thing of beauty. You've missed a thing of beautiful physics as he is renowned for being able to "bend" the ball so that it bypasses the defensive wall and swirl into the goal.