Dear Bill Gates.

You did it. You casually left a live grenade at the Grand Charity Gala and walked out of the room to see if anybody, especially Google, will notice.

Once again, you have created an innovation in marketing that is poised to take the world by storm. What I love about it is how you have just tossed it out into the public for all to see, and yet nobody seems to be noticing it.

Flitting from forum to forum, everyone is talking about your new MSN beta search engine ( http://beta.search.msn.com/ ), but nobody seems to have discovered the secret marketing bomb you left ticking there.

Google sure was clever with its PageRank gimmick. In fairness, PageRank is not just a gimmick, but it was marketed as much more than it is -- the big ka-boom that sets Google apart, despite being only a small part of its algorithm.

But your ka-boom will be bigger. You have actually given searchers like me control over my own rankings. While other search engines are talking about "personalized search", you've given us the levers to incrementally change rankings in searches themselves.

You are probably aware that webmasters are kicking the tires on your new search engine to see how high they rank. Those who are more adventuresome or who earn their living understanding (or trying to understand) search engines are taking some of your special features for a spin. Most of those features are fairly mundane. Like "links to" (although it might just be the most comprehensive listing on the Internet