I just checked MSN.com right now and typed in freerepublic.com and it showed up just fine. They use the Bing search engine for results.
Yes, just tried it again and this time as you stated, it did return freerepublic.com as the first listing.
All I can say is that on the particular XP home computer I was working on, it did not show up at all. Have no explanation for you, it seems to give the correct results now from this Redhat Linux box.
TF