Microsoft Corp. is giving an early holiday gift to people who pay for all-you-can-listen access to the Zune digital music store: 10 songs to keep each month, included in the $14.99 monthly subscription fee.

The decision may appeal to people who have been reluctant to test out the subscription model, preferring to own their music instead of rent it. Microsoft’s Zune Pass, RealNetworks Inc.’s Rhapsody and others give users unlimited access to millions of songs in exchange for a monthly fee. But as soon as the user stops paying, the music stops playing unless he or she forks over extra money to buy each track.

With the new Zune Pass perk, subscribers can use the Zune desktop software as usual to buy individual songs, and the service keeps track of how many free ones remain for the month. In most cases, the song will come in the MP3 format, which can be freely copied to multiple devices and computers.

If Google delivers useless search results, just erase them and you won’t see them again.

That’s possible under a new system Google Inc. unveiled Thursday. Hoping to give its search engine a more personal touch, Google now lets users reshuffle results so their favorite Web sites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request.

It marks the first time that the Internet’s most popular search engine has allowed its audience to alter the order of search results.

Although the revisions won’t affect Google’s closely guarded formulas for ranking Web sites, the Mountain View-based company isn’t ruling out eventually tapping into collective wisdom of the crowds to tweak its Internet-searching algorithms.

For now, Google simply wants to make specific sets of results more useful to each individual that comes to its search engine, said Marissa Mayer, who oversees the company’s search products. Users will have to have a personal login to take advantage of the editing feature.

“It should make the search results more dynamic,” she said.