We've come a long way since C: prompts and DOS commands, but using a PC remains a painfully difficult proposition for many.

Today's PC interfaces are less intuitive than they need to be. A computer screen is too often a mass of perplexing letters, numbers, and symbols, and finding what we want too often involves typing some arcane address or code. A GUI spreadsheet is a wonderful thing—but can your grandmother use one? Google gives you access to an incredible amount of information—but shouldn't it be easier to find what you're seeking?

We're still years from intuitive PCs , but improvements are coming. For starters, IBM Research is working to improve the way we hunt for information. Arthur Ciccolo, who runs the lab's information and knowledge management department, believes that even the word we use to describe this task is flawed. "Search is a really bad term," he says. "It conjures up the same feeling you get when you've lost your car keys."

Ciccolo prefers the word find, and his team has developed technologies that reflect this terminology. "We're on the cusp of turning the corner of an entirely new generation of search engines and other search capabilities," he says. IBM Research is working on not only semantic and natural language searches but even simple methods to search audio and video files.

A semantic search engine doesn't just locate documents containing a keyword. "We recognize not only mentions of people, places, and organizations, we also recognize relationships between those entities and create data structures that describe those relationships," says Ciccolo. Search on "bimonthly magazine," and the engine can return a link to the PC Magazine home page—even if the page doesn't contain that exact term.

Natural language lets you search by typing ordinary conversational questions. These questions are then semantically analyzed and transformed into queries your computer can understand. Once the computer finds an answer to your question, the answer can be translated back into natural language. You could ask for a list of facts about film director Billy Wilder, and rather than returning a list of documents that contain Wilder's name, your machine would return a list of facts.

Add in audio and video search, and you can easily locate multimedia files related to particular words or concepts—even if there's no associated text. IBM's framework can analyze spoken words, sounds, and images, determining what a given multimedia file contains. The framework is even accurate enough to recognize individuals. "It got very good at recognizing President Clinton," says Ciccolo.

Researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) are also working on improved graphical interfaces. The 3Book project would make electronic documents behave more like physical books, with digital pages you turn with the brush of a finger.

PARC is also working on new interfaces for common applications, including computer spreadsheets. Large spreadsheets are difficult to navigate; you have to scroll through many pages of tiny words and numbers. With PARC's revamped spreadsheet, you can view a visual representation of a large spread on a single page. Letters and numbers are transformed into shapes and graphs, and as you mouse over a particular part of the spreadsheet, specific data appears in close-up.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Research is exploring interfaces that extend even further beyond today's methods. For example, rather than forcing us to deal with overlapping full-size windows, WinCuts dynamically grabs small regions of open windows and displays them without overlap, so you can move between apps more smoothly.

Another Microsoft initiative, multiblending, lets you simultaneously display overlapping windows without resizing them. The graphics of background and foreground windows are rendered so that you can easily read both at the same time. Microsoft is even working on something called the brain interface, which uses your brain activity to mold a computer's behavior to your particular needs. "We're trying to detect motor cortex activation, when a user is reading, counting, etc.," says lead group manager Mary Czerwinski. "When we can detect this kind of processing, perhaps [a PC] can present new content in a manner that won't interfere with those activities."

A machine that adjusts its behavior according to your thoughts? It doesn't get any easier than that.