Super-peer architectures exploit the heterogeneity of nodes in a P2P network by assigning additional responsibilities to higher-capacity nodes. In the design of a super-peer network for file sharing, several issues have to be addressed: how client peers are related to super-peers, how super-peers locate files, how the load is balanced among the super-peers, and how the system deals with node failures. In this paper we introduce a self-organizing super-peer network architecture (SOSPNET) that solves these issues in a fully decentralized manner. SOSPNET maintains a super-peer network topology that reflects the semantic similarity of peers sharing content interests. Super-peers maintain semantic caches of pointers to files which are requested by peers with similar interests. Client peers, on the other hand, dynamically select super-peers offering the best search performance. We show how this simple approach can be employed not only to optimize searching, but also to solve generally difficult problems encountered in P2P architectures such as load balancing and fault tolerance. We evaluate SOSPNET using a model of the semantic structure derived from the 8-month traces of two large file-sharing communities. The obtained results indicate that SOSPNET achieves close-to-optimal file search performance, quickly adjusts to changes in the environment (node joins and leaves), survives even catastrophic node failures, and efficiently distributes the system load taking into account peer capacities.