The learnware paradigm aims to construct a market of numerous well-performing machine learning models, which enables users to leverage these models to accomplish specific tasks without having to build models from scratch. Each learnware in the market is a model associated with a specification, representing the model’s utility and enabling it to be identified according to future users’ requirements. In the learnware paradigm, due to the vast and ever-increasing number of models in the market, a significant challenge is to identify helpful learnwares efficiently for a specific user task without leaking data privacy. However, existing identification methods require examining the whole market, which is computationally unaffordable in a large market. In this paper, we propose a new framework for identifying helpful learnwares without examining the whole market. Specifically, using the Reduced Kernel Mean Embedding (RKME) specification, we derive a novel learnware scoring criterion for assessing the helpfulness of a learnware, based on which we design an anchor-based framework to identify helpful learnwares by examining only a small portion of learnwares in the market. Theoretical analyses are provided for both the criterion and the anchor-based method. Empirical studies on market containing thousands of learnwares from real-world datasets confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach.