The MetaCrawler Softbot is a parallel Web search service that has been available at the University of Washington since June of 1995. It provides users with a single interface with which they can query popular general-purpose Web search services, such as Lycos[6] and AltaVista[1], and has some sophisticated features that allow it to obtain results of much higher quality than simply regurgitating the output from each search service. In this article, we briefly outline the motivation for MetaCrawler and highlight previous work, and then discuss the architecture of MetaCrawler and how it enables MetaCrawler to perform well and to scale and adapt to a dynamic Internet.