But what's this at the very bottom, almost falling off my screen?

Results Ranking.

Hey, this is cool. I can control the results myself. I can give more weight to recently-updated sites, which is great when I am following a breaking story (After the America's Cup, I do not want to find all the pre-race predictions, for example.). Or I can weight the results in favor of static pages if I am trying to find again the health information I had read last time my daughter broke out in blue and green splotches all over her body.

And you let me decide whether to weigh heavily exact matches, if I know exactly what I am looking for, or approximate matches if I know only that the itchy splotches come from some rare Polar virus transmitted by stampeding trans-Atlantic penguins.

I even get to choose to boost rankings for popular sites or, if I'm feeling like a rebel, for less popular sites. Yes, you have even appealed to my deepest psychological mood swings. This is really cool.

But what really counts is this: I control MSN!

I can just imagine the TV ads you have already planned: The ad character (a student, a construction worker, a nurse?) says, "Move over Bill Gates, I'm in charge now." The voiceover says, "Search MSN" PageRank will taste like yesterday's chewing gum.

I decided to find out if I really do control MSN, using one of my client sites. I chose Dotcom-Monitor Web Site Monitoring ( http://www.dotcom-monitor.com ) and the search term "website monitoring". As I write, the site sits at #3 for that search term.

I turbo charged the popularity lever to 100%. Whoa. Dotcom-Monitor lost a spot. What does that mean? Somebody who does not rank as highly as my client got a boost by weighing link popularity higher (and, by extension, on-page content lower).