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Page titles are must if you want to improve your ranking. Your ranking also depends on how frequent googlebots visiting your site. If the bots come to your site everyday doing a full crawl, the ranking of the particular item will have a high ranking, otherwise, it will rank behind others.
If your site is listed in Google directory, you will have a chance of high ranking. It seems that Google has been filtering out many sites listed in DMOZ directory. With so much power, Google seems to misbehave a lots recently.
MSN and Yahoo! still have long way to catch up with Google. Hope one day these two will be equal to Google. But with $ in front of them (charging for directory listing), I am not sure they ever will.