I'm a developer at BarterQuest, and I stumbled upon this post from you recently. I wanted to try and clarify some of the things mentioned in this post and in your comments.
During our Invitation-Only Beta Testing period, we are requiring users to sign up to do most activities on our site. This is mostly due to the fact that we want to measure how our site performs with signed-up users who will have access to all of our sites features.
As it relates to the article linked here, BarterQuest has a patented Matching Engine, which depending on what you have to trade and what you want to trade it for, among other things like specific attributes for your item, it will calculate the best matches for you, so you won't have to be searching all over the site for that item you're looking for. Of course, you'll be able to do that too, but we're confident our Matching Engine will be able to do the job for you. Right now since we're still in testing, the match results won't be plentiful, but as time goes on and we roll out of Beta testing and more users post more items, it'll be relatively easy to get accurate matches.
I encourage you (and to sign up during this testing period. Right now the site is totally free of cost, and if you're able to complete a successful trade during the testing period, you'll get free trading for an entire year. We also have some additional bonuses for signed-up users as well, which will be announced in our blog (http://blog.barterquest.com) soon.
