This paper is concerned with the matchmaker for ranking web services by using semantics. So far several methods of semantic matchmaker have been proposed. Most of them, however, focus on classifying the services into predefined categories rather than providing a ranking result. In this paper, a new method of semantic matchmaker is proposed for ranking web services. It is proposed to use the semantic distance for estimating the matching degree between a service and a user request. Four types of semantic distances are defined and four algorithms are implemented respectively to calculate them. Experimental results show that the proposed semantic matchmaker significantly outperforms the keywordbased baseline method.