Now that the dust has settled......

What determines rankings on MSN?

[skibum]

Now that the first LookSmart billing cycle has ended, the directory results on MSN are dramatically different in some cases, not just because some haven't coughed up the cash...MSN appears to be doing some things differently.

It appears that terms of a two or more word phrase must generally occur together in the title or description in order for a site to turn up in the top results.

On the other hand, a search on CRM [search.msn.com] used to yield around 250+ web directory results. Now we're down to 41. MSFT appears to have helped themselves to the top spot.

The top 6 after the MSFT listing appear to be "free" listings with no tracking code. Most results have CRM in the title, description, or URL, however there at number 7, is a listing for "Remedy".

There is no CRM anywhere, nor is "Customer Relationship Management" in the description, which appears to get translated to CRM in many cases.

There appears to be more to ranking than meets the eye, yet payment is not suppose to influence the results except as to reslt in inclusion or exclusion from the "core search results".

What's going on here?