This study compared finding economic and energy information on the WWW to finding the same information on DIALOG, a traditional search service. Professional searchers answered 20 questions for end users using either of DIALOG and one Internet database (general search engine or Web database). The relevance of the results in both sets of answers was ranked by searchers and end-users, respectively. The study found that searching for information on the Web took at least twice as long as it did when using DIALOG. Relevance rating was a little higher for materials found on DIALOG. However, the relevance rating difference between two systems was not so higher than we expected. From the research results, we conclude that Internet database including Web database and general search engines is providing valuable information of economic and energy subject areas.