We developed a web-based soil survey browser to enhance the accessibility of soils information for the public. High costs and complexity of commercial GIS software can limit the average person's ability to access digital soil survey information. Although published hardcopies of soil surveys exist for most of the western region, many are out of print and not easily accessible to the public. Open source software tools such as Mapserver, GDAL, MySQL, Apache, and PHP were used to create a seamless interactive soils map of California, Arizona and Nevada using the State Soil Geographic Database (STATSGO, 1:250,000 scale) and Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO 1:24,000 scale). Publicly available contextual geographic data such as 7.5 minute quadrangle borders, aerial photography, LANDSAT, urban areas, highways, and hydrography become visible at various scales while users navigate with point and click operations to easily locate their position on the map. A dynamic legend and context map were designed to aid users in map interpretation. Soil map units can be queried with a mouse click, taking the user to a hierarchal summary of map units and soil components. At the map unit level, selected attribute data are summarized in tabular format. At the component level, selected attribute data is presented in tables and figures along with a diagram of a representative soil profile. Many concepts such as soil series, taxonomic information, or terminology specific to soil survey interpretations are linked to NRCS pages that contain detailed descriptions of terms. The integrated linkage to outside information makes the online soil survey a useful tool for general soils education as well