Sorry, my background is showing
Gratis is a Latin vulgate term that means "free of charge" or "complimentary". When I used it in a comment, I meant that I expected it to make things easier to use, without actually impacting the solution at all.
As Rudy pointed out, in this case it simply orders the result set so that the most frequently occuring items appear at the top of the list. You can safely ignore it if it doesn't help you.
-PatP