Your e-commerce business offers your customers the convenience and comparison-shopping capabilities that come with the Web. And it no doubt offers unique products, pricing or services that set you apart from the competition.

However, despite all the benefits your e-business offers, customers are basically on their own to find what they are looking for on your site. That presents a challenge that store owners in the physical world don't share. In that world, shoppers can follow the crowd to see where the new products or special bargains may lie.

Jack Jia, CEO of Baynote, call this phenomena the "wisdom of the crowd." The theory goes that buyers benefit by watching the behaviors of peers, experts and the larger community.

"Baynote is looking beyond Web sites to real life, to the wisdom of the crowd. On every Web site there is a community —an invisible crowd of thousands or hundreds. If you make a mistake, I want to learn from it."

Without tapping the power of the online community, "too many people are getting lost and 83 percent will abandon the site because they can't find what they are looking for." On average, Jia said, it takes a person six clicks to find what they are looking for.

Baynote, a startup that specializes in content guidance, offers services that are designed to work on top any Web site or search engine and offers results that, the company claims, are 20 percent more useful and personalized for your visitors. Baynote also analyzes aggregated visitor behavior to produce a "UseRank," which dynamically ranks results based on their useful to the community.

At the center of the service is Baynote's Affinity Engine, which produces actionable recommendations based on the behavior of the community.

To help you guide visitors to products or important pages, Baynote Guide is based on a set of HTML tags you add to your site. For example, you can add features such as links to "most useful content," "next step" and "more like this." This service equates to the experience of "being greeted at the door" of physical store, Jia said.

Also, to help you better understand your visitor community, Baynote Insights provides reports that measure aggregated user interests and behavior to identify gaps in the site's content, such as unsuccessful searches or abandoned visits. Users can also be organized and tracked as clubs, according to Baynote. The more people who use your site, the larger the community becomes and the more value the insight accumulates.

The cost of services vary depending on traffic, but pricing start at $95 for small businesses, Jia said.

To help entice small businesses to give it a try, Baynote today announced the launch of Baynote Go, a free offering that's designed to let visitors search your Web site without any software, hosting or support costs. Baynote Go is built on the Apache Foundation's Nutch open source search engine. So if your business can't afford to for for a third-party search product, you can still use Baynote's content guidance service. Plus, Nutch's capabilities are arguably as good as many commerical search tools.

Also announced today is Baynote.org, which, Jia said, is the result of Baynote's work with the open source search community to extend Nutch to provide business-ready search including hosting, administration and community-based support — all free of charge.

You can use the service in one of three ways: as a service hosted by Baynote; as a virtual appliance that you download and turn on to run pre-configured on your server; or as an application that you download and configure yourself. According to Baynote, the technical sophistication needed rises with from none to some to absolutely necessary, respectively.

Baynote will provide six months of hosted search and 30 days of Baynote service, according to Jia.

Dan Muse is executive editor of internet.com's Small Business Channel, EarthWeb's Networking Channel and ServerWatch.

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