Questionable spelling aside, U Rank’s name pretty well illustrates its main feature.  Users have the option of reordering, adding, or deleting search results, and can write notes as well.  Through the use of a Windows Live ID, all of these changes get saved between sessions.  Both Google and Yahoo have been down this path.

 U Rank Result Reordering

Then there’s one more little twist.  A post on "U Rank’s space" explains, "Changes you make to your search results while sharing is on will be visible to your friends."  And as for the privacy problem, "If you want to hide or delete any changes you’ve made to search results, you can go to your history page and find all of your edits there."

Don’t expect to see these social and DIY abilities made defaults on Live Search anytime soon, but Microsoft may at least expand the experiment at some point.  Don’t be surprised if users’ reordered U Rank results are made part of some minor update, too.

In the meantime, if you’re the type of person who doesn’t write a 10-page essay every time a business messes up, use U Rank at your own risk.  Frederic Lardinois writes, "Search results take a long time to load, and some very basic user interface issues clearly still need to be worked out. 

"There is, for example, no way to move a search result from the second search page to the first, and the interface for dragging and dropping items sometimes doesn’t work well."

It’s not entirely original, of course. Google’s been experimenting with personalized search results for a while now. U Rank is accessible via existing members’ Windows Live ID.

U Rank applies the concept of social search by allowing users to adjust their search results to suit them and to allow them to annotate search results during research. There’s also a collaborative function that allows groups of people adjust results for whatever kind of group research project they may be working on. Friends/coworkers can also simply recommend results on specific topics.

Microsoft gives pretty thorough examples of how customized search results could be utilized, from organizing and annotating websites related to upcoming conferences, for keeping lists, for organizing tools used by groups of people, or for mixing multimedia results like video and images.

But it seems to me if Microsoft really wants to gain lost search ground to Google, the company’s going to have to be innovative on its own. There’s a famous South Park episode called “Simpsons Already Did It,” where one of the characters’ alter ego goes about town trying to cause mischief. He can’t come up with anything original because everything he thinks of already happened on The Simpsons.

Just call Microsoft “Professor Chaos,” then, even if we know it’s really Butters.