Imagine it's the semi-finals of the U.S. Open and Roger Federer hits a ball that lands near the base line. "Is it in or out?" the world's No. 1 player asks the linesman, who shrugs and then the chair umpire. The umpire responds, "I can't tell you. But we'll let you know when we total up the score."

That's the way the rules for search engine rankings seem to work in the world of the major players, Microsoft and Google.  We know there are rules and we can deduce some of them when we see how well articles on our Web sites do in appearing in searches.

CCH, a stalwart supplier in the traditional tax and accounting market, is pushing upward to a less-traditional area with its sales-and-use-tax systems. In announcements seven days apart, the Riverwoods, Ill.-based vendor said that CCH Sales Tax Office 2.0 has been certified by SAP for integration with SAP ERP and that it had partnered with Global Tax Management which is providing the middleware for CCH CorpSystem to enable Oracle to communicate with the CCH suite in real time.