Abstract: In a services exchange medium, buyers are able to search and hire service providers to get projects done quickly and cost effectively. A buyer-provider matching algorithm uses two scores to calculate a “Provider Search” score for each service provider: a “Reputation” score and a “Provider Match” score. In some embodiments, the “Reputation” score is a quantitative metric score of a service provider's overall reputation within the services exchange medium. In other embodiments, the “Reputation” score is configured to enhance the “Provider Match” score. Since reputation is an important attribute when searching for a qualified service provider, the “Provider Search” score takes into consideration the “Reputation” score. A provider results list generated from a provider search is sorted by the “Provider Search” score. As such, the provider results list is sorted in a significant manner useful to the buyer searching for the qualified service provider.

Abstract: A method of and system for ranking users by reputation enables better searching for a service provider. Service providers are also forced to conform to reputation requirements since they are published. The reputation requirements include reviews, earnings, duration on a site, recent visits and other components that are able to establish a user's reputation. The components are also weighted so that more important factors count more towards a user's reputation. By combining a search score and a reputation score, a total score is determined which is used to generate a list of results ordered based on the total score.