Necessity is the mother of invention; thus the explosion of knowledge and the advances in the technical development of computers have enabled access to electronic information and medical informatics. Those of us who remember the exhausting search for references in Index Medicus can appreciate this new era in medicine. The impact of uncovering such a huge information resource affects the working methods and habits of our colleagues. The Internet is a computer network accessible to millions of computer users worldwide. This 'information superhighway' contains a multitude of information of interest to health-care professionals and is growing at an explosive rate of between 1 and 2 million users per month 1. For a topic such as obstetric and gynecological ultrasound, the Internet with its graphic applications has great potential as a tool for communication, information retrieval, research and education. In order to investigate the attitude and personal experience of obstetric/gynecological sonologists in using the Internet, we conducted an international survey among colleagues. A questionnaire regarding various aspects of Internet use was mailed to a sample of 119 members of the International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology who had contributed to the Official Journal of the Society. Consecutive current publications of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology served as the source for addresses. The list included 62 members from European countries, 32 from North America, 21 from Asia and four from Australia and New Zealand. Of the 119 questionnaires sent out, 45 replies were received and 11 letters were returned because of mailing problems, resulting in an overall response rate of 41.7%. Of all the respondents, 93.0% use the worldwide web for medical information retrieval, and 75.0% of them incorporate net-search in their routine work. Of the Internet users, 51.5% communicate more than once a week, 27.3% about once a week, 9.1% once a month and 12.1% use it occasionally, i.e. less than once a month. All respondents (even those who claim that they are not using the web at all) search the net for medical information using various databases such as Medline. The Medline system was used in the survey as a common name for an indexing system because it is the most popular. The list of indexing systems on the web includes, amongst others, Medscape, PubMed, MedNet, MedWeb and EMBASE. Medical links on the web offer pathways to related aspects of medicine. Obstetric sonologists may find sites such as the fetal pathology index, embryological effects index and catalogues of fetal anomalies very helpful in their work by using Medlink, Pedlynx, MedCat and other systems. Most