A computer-implemented method of arbitrating encrypted electronic transactions among an intermediary user and an authoring user of an electronic data system only when an interaction occurs between the authoring user and a candidate user, the method comprising the steps of:
- receiving at a computer server system a plurality of published electronic data records over a computer network created and published by a plurality of authoring users, at least some of the published electronic data records including a set of first criteria that a desired candidate user is required to satisfy and a set of second criteria that the desired candidate user can optionally satisfy, the second set of criteria being ranked according to a ranking by a first of the plurality of authoring users;
- assigning weights, by a calculation engine of the computer server system, to the set of first criteria and to the set of second criteria in accordance with the ranking;
- receiving, over the computer network or another network, a plurality of candidate electronic data records ingested from an electronic web crawler component and including personally identifiable information of a plurality of candidate users hosted online by third parties;
- forming, by a web service, a structured query from the personally identifiable information to produce a list of intermediary users;
- determining, by an intermediary tracking component, that a first of the intermediary users sent an electronic message to a first of the candidate users, the electronic message including a first of the published electronic data records, to expose the first of the candidate users to information associated with the first of the published electronic data records;
- automatically calculating by a score calculation component, for the first of the intermediary users, an intermediary score indicative of a number of the plurality of candidate users (a) to which the first of the intermediary users exposed any of the published electronic data records published by a subset of the authoring users and (b) which resulted in at least an encrypted electronic transaction occurring between the first of the intermediary users and each of the subset of the authoring users;
- automatically calculating, for each of the candidate users by the computer server system, a candidate score that is based on the intermediary score for the first of the intermediary users and on correlations between (a) at least some of the personally identifiable information extracted from the respective one or more of the plurality of candidate electronic data records posted online by the respective one of the candidate users and (b) the weights assigned to the sets of first and second criteria;
- tracking by the computer server system that the first of the intermediary users exposed the first of the candidate users to information in the first of the published electronic data records by storing an association in an electronic memory device between the first of the intermediary users and the first of the candidate users, thereby reducing bandwidth consumption over the computer network;
- receiving, at the computer server system, an indication from a first of the plurality of authoring users of an occurrence of an interaction between an authoring person corresponding to the first of the authoring users and a candidate person corresponding to the first of the candidate users who was exposed by the first of the intermediary users to the information associated with the first of the published electronic data records;
- and
- the computer server system permitting and thereby causing an encrypted electronic transaction to occur only in response to receiving the indication of the occurrence of the interaction, wherein the encrypted electronic transaction occurs among the first of the authoring users and the first of the intermediary users directly or using the computer server system as a proxy for the encrypted electronic transaction.