Patent ID: 7516086

Claim:
An information distribution system, comprising: a request subsystem, including a request, wherein said request subsystem receives said request, wherein said request includes at least one rating selection and at least one of a geography selection and a category selection; and a response subsystem, including a response, a placement heuristic that determines an order of listings and is based at least in part on a fee amount and a rating, a plurality of listings, and a plurality of fee types; wherein said response subsystem generates said response based upon said request and said placement heuristic; the response subsystem including at least one priority metric that is influenced by a relevance metric that takes into consideration an estimated relevance of a particular listing to the request; wherein said placement heuristic receives said priority metric as an input and the order of listings further based at least in part on a user profile that ranks a relative importance of the rating selection and at least one of the geography selection and the category selection; wherein said response includes two or more listings from said plurality of listings, each listing being associated with at least one fee type in said plurality of fee types; and further wherein the rating is assigned to a ratings tier according to a source of the rating.