The problem is finding someone at the vendor's site to ask.

Take Yahoo, for instance. Yahoo is the Internet catalog extraordinaire, founded a few years ago by a couple of college students who knew how to find things on the Web. In five years the company has grown into a $4 billion enterprise. The site performs a wonderful service, providing free (to you and me) information on where to find what and whom. They provide news, links, a great home page, and even free e-mail. Yahoo is good.

But try asking Yahoo a question. Imagine that you are trying to open a Yahoo mail account, and you're perplexed why the first 20 IDs you have submitted as a login name -- including completely absurd, random alphanumeric combinations -- are rejected as "taken." You want to ask, "Who took the ID beboppalulaX9 before me?"

But there is no e-mail box on Yahoo's front porch, at least not in any of its main greeting areas. So you can't ask. In the NEED HELP? section, you can only get help if the help you want is the help they figured you would want.

Or go to Microsoft's site, http://www.microsoft.com, with a question about, oh, Microsoft Word 97, and how to acquire templates for it.

Microsoft is the king of technical support. If you've got any sort of technical support problem, about Windows, or any of their applications, they'll do their best for you by phone -- and they are less insistent on demanding proof-of-purchase and serial numbers than other companies.

But getting through to them via e-mail is a different story. I was having a minor problem with a new package of Microsoft Home Essentials. Having a day or two to burn, I wanted to ask the question by e-mail. At the top of Microsoft's site , and indeed, atop almost every page within the site, is a box labeled WRITE US.

But it isn't what you might think. The WRITE US box is only for three kinds of messages there -- messages that help Microsoft, not you. Specifically, the form allows you to make product suggestions, make suggestions for improving the web site, and file bug reports.

There is another route you can go. A box labeled SUPPORT reveals a host of support options. The one you are encouraged to use is first is SupportOnline. SupportOnline is a robotized, artificial-intelligence Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) machine. You fill in forms explaining your problem, and it offers a list of possible solutions based on keywords.

Your chances of success on SupportOnline are limited by Microsoft's ability to intuit your question in advance, and your ability to call things by the same names Microsoft calls them -- always a guess, in this proprietary world.

Because of the canned nature of the answers, my mission at the website was doomed from the start. A store clerk had told me that the Home Essentials package I purchased was cheap because it omitted the templates that the standalone versions of the programs offered. The salesman was wrong. So I was asking the robot FAQ machine questions whose answers could not possibly be programmed into it.

What frustrated me was that there seemed to be no more human source for answers. Eventually I found, about eight screens into the Microsoft website, a hotlink allowing you to speak to an Microsoft engineer. That in turn led you through a series of four more screens, at which point, after filling in several forms, proving you are in fact a customer and are willing to pay for future support, you can ask your question.

Now, you may ask, why is it so hard for Yahoo and Microsoft and other online mainstays, such as Amazon Books and Netscape, to communicate through the tool they themselves bill as the best thing to happen to human communications since speech?

The answer, believe it or not, is that they can't afford to communicate well. Internet businesses are built on economies of scale. You can create a first-rate global commercial web site for a tiny fraction what a Subway Sandwich Shop franchise costs. Your cost is low because computers do everything.

But computers can't anticipate all the problems human customers have. Many people have problems that need dealing with. Your challenge as an Internet business is to deal with people without incurring conventional costs like, hiring people to answer questions. So instead of hiring 100 smart people fulltime to answer questions, you hire two programmers part time to create a robot FAQ.

Customer may still think they are "customers" and thus entitled to explanations and courtesies. But that day is gone. An online business is the communications equivalent of a Roach Motel. They welcome you in, they ring up the transaction, and they hope you're satisfied.

But don't look for that mint under your pillow, cuz it ain't there.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.