Baynote came out of stealth mode today with a software as a service product it calls "content guidance." It helps users find what they want on web sites with thousands of documents by studying the behavior of prior visitors.

Type in a search term and up pops a selection of relevant documents that are "useranked" according to how others found what they wanted.

"Our technology works as a silent observer and we can tell by a user's behavior if they found what they were looking for. When you consider the fact that studies show only 17 per cent of web site visitors find what they were looking for, that means you are wasting 83 per cent of your money spent on online marketing campaigns to drive users to your site," says Jack Jia, CEO of Baynote.

Typically, it can take six clicks to find relevant content and today's visitors are increasingly less patient and more likely to give up. Mr Jia claims Baynote's technology provides a 20 times increase in users finding the content they want, usually in just one click.

Mr Jia is a former CTO of Interwoven, so he has a good understanding of web site design and content plus his team makes use of the latest discoveries in artificial intelligence. The Baynote technology tracks 12 key behavioral characteristics displayed by web site visitors in order to determine whether they found what they wanted or left frustrated.

The service also offers a variety of usage reports and is available for $995 per month for large businesses and $95 per month for small businesses.

SVW's take: The price seems a bit steep for small businesses but for large web sites serving many different types of user groups, Baynote potentially provides a way to avoid leaving lots of frustrated visitors.

The service is also a good way to test web site designs to make sure the most popular content is easily accessible and where to tweak navigational elements.

One problem is that search on large web sites is notoriously bad because you can't apply the traditional page rank methods to determine the importance of a specific web page or document. And so people's bad experiences with site search on large corporate sites means that they will often avoid the search box and thus might skip the little icon that signifies Baynote's search technology is being used.

Baynote does offer other ways of connecting users with relevant content by clever use of AJAX and mouse-over techniques that popup pages in a Browster-like way without requiring users to commit to a click. The background loading of pages into cache however, will skew resident analytical software. But Baynote provides an analytics component as part of the service, which provides detailed usage reports.

Interestingly, Baynote does not use its technology on its own web site - there is no search box!!!!