I am still curious to know if there are other systems where you can do this easily. As far as I can tell most of the systems out there are Java based. I suspect most systems are like Open Market and that this part of the code is closed source so that, even if it could be fixed, there is no way for an SI to do it. Apoorv mentioned that he used Atomz with Open Market. Thanks for the clarification on Google and Alta Vista.
Search engines tend to choke on it.
So that makes it pretty darn easy for the basics. MySQL even has built-in rankings etc.