A novice search-engine user may find searching the Web for information difficult and frustrating because he may naturally express search goals rather than the topic keywords search engines need. GOOSE (Goal-Oriented Search Engine Interface) is an adaptive search-engine interface that uses natural-language processing to parse a user�s search goal, and common-sense reasoning to interpret this goal and reason from it an effective query. For a source of common-sense knowledge, we use the Open Mind Common Sense Project. 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.