Why MSN blows and Google is worth 675.82 per share

I love how Google has become a verb - similar to Tivo (or now DVR) and Xerox. Yahoo has not become a verb. MSN most certainly is not a verb. But Google is.

I Googled Platinum Elite this morning on the three big search engine guns (aside - wow, I just realized that I am "Googling" things on Yahoo - that's like going down south, where "Coke" is synonymous with "soda," so you can have a Sprite Coke) to see what I came up with, and to my surprise, a search on "platinum elite" returned Platinum Elite (i.e. this blog, platinumelite.blogspot.com) as #1 on Google, #1 on Yahoo, and nowhere to be seen on the first page of MSN. I have checked out my ranking in the past, and usually hovered around #2 or #3 natural search on Google, but never #1.

Does MSN just have their head in the sand in terms of Blogger users, bitter that they don't own the ubiquitous blogspot.com domain, perhaps? How can they be so off? I was indeed searching exactly for what Google and Yahoo returned as their #1 listing, and MSN wasn't even close. Search engines are only as good as how precisely they can return relevant search results based on queries.

Why do I care? I just think it's kind of fun to be ranked so high on this search term, simply because I do nothing to optimize the site, and especially because it's the status level for frequent fliers in at least two major airlines' programs (Continental and Northwest).