After the news of Beckham playing for LA galaxy broke in January, Hitwise reported that searches for ‘la galaxy’ were almost 30% higher than those for ‘david beckham’ and ‘la galaxy’ was the 13th most searched-for term of almost 7,000 terms that resulted in traffic to the Hitwise Sports - Football category.
According to Hitwise US on August 15th, the most popular searches for the term ‘beckham’ were ‘victoria beckham,’ ‘david beckham,’ ‘beckham,’ ‘victoria beckham pictures’ and ‘victoria beckham coming to America’ for the four weeks ending 08/11/07.
Because I did not believe the numbers of Hitwise, I took a look at the offline buzz of Beckham myself and visited the NY Redbulls vs. LA Galaxy game yesterday. And here’s the reason why the numbers are diluted: