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A novice search engine user may find searching the web for information difficult and frustrating because she may naturally express search goals rather than the topic keywords search engines need. In this paper, we present GOOSE (goal-oriented search engine), an adaptive search engine interface that uses natural language processing to parse a user’s search goal, and uses “common sense” reasoning to translate this goal into an effective query. For a source of common sense knowledge, we use Open Mind, a knowledge base of approximately 400,000 simple facts such as “If a pet is sick, take it to the veterinarian” garnered from a Web-wide network of contributors. While we cannot be assured of the robustness of the common sense inference, in a substantial number of cases, GOOSE is more likely to satisfy the user’s original search goals than simple keywords or conventional query expansion.