My application takes a verbal passage and performs an internet search (on Google Books) on each sentence in the passage gathering citations. It then goes ahead to manipulate the citations. It works just fine, but slowly and I am trying to speed up the process. The speed problem stems from the fact that response time and download time for the website being searched varies according to passage.

The first thing I did was to break the passages down and use separate WebBrowser Controls to run the searches simultaneously. That had limited success and is further hampered by the fact that I will not know at design time how many searches any given passage will require.

Next I thought that I would simply through the WebBrowser into a separate thread, but here the problem is that I'm not sure I can create a thread on the fly. (I would appreciate input on that).

Next I decided that I would put the WebBrowser and the new thread into a separate class object, but I have realized that that probably doesn't have the desired effect because the main thread is going to be waiting on the class object before proceeding with execution irrespective of the fact that the class object has instantiated a new thread for the WebBrowser.

Any guidance would be appreciated.