Content Searching on Gather - A Tutorial

Here are a few tips to help you search for articles on Gather more effectively.

You may search for articles by tag, title or text.  Currently, other content on Gather, like images and groups, can only be located by tag.

The best way to find articles on Gather is through the 'Search Articles' box at the top of all pages on Gather.  This box appears under the menu bar, and is outlined in bright blue.

Body Text Search

Looking for an article on Gardening?  Simply enter the word Gardening in the search box (Gather search is not case sensitive).

All articles that contain this word in the body of the work will then be returned on the search results page.  

However, this method of search does not look at the title of the article for the search word.

Title Text Search

To search within the title, you must preface your search with the term 'title', followed by a colon (:), as in this example:

This combination of search words and terms is known as a search string.

The search string above will return all articles with the word 'gardening' in the title. It will ignore whether the word is also used in the body of the article. 

Unfortunately Gather's search function will not allow you to search for the word 'gardening' in either the title OR the body of the article.  Therefore, you must do two separate searches to ensure you have performed a thorough search.  Hopefully, this will be changed in a future release.

In order to search for words within the body of an article AND within the title, you must combine search strings or words separated by a space or comma (with, or without a trailing space).  The search below will find all articles with the word 'rose' in the body of the article AND 'gardening' in the title:

Using combinations of terms and words in this way will allow you to narrow your search more easily, and to quickly identify content that is important to you.  Be certain to separate each search string with a space or comma.


Tag Search

To also search by tag, you would preface your search with the term 'tag', followed by a colon (:), like this:

This search will return all articles with a tag of gardening.  You may also combine this tag search with the other search strings outlined above, like this:

Excluding Results

Occasionally, excluding certain terms from a search can be beneficial.  This is useful when you want to ignore a specific segment of a broader subject.  For example:

This search will locate all articles containing the word 'immigration', but NOT also containing the word 'illegal'. 

The term 'NOT' must be in upper case letters, or it will not be recognized.  This exclusion term can also be used in combination with any other search string.

Caution:  being too specific can also unnecessarily limit your results, so learning an additional technique may be helpful....


Using Wildcards

Wildcards are perhaps the most useful, and little known, capability in Gather's article search.  A wildcard can be used to substitute for another character, or series of characters.  This is useful when you aren't certain how a word is spelled, or whether another form of a word was used by an author.

The two wildcards which can be used are the asterisk (*), and the question mark (?).   At this time, wildcards cannot be used when searching for tags, only body text and title searches are supported.

The asterisk (*) substitutes for a series of characters within a search word.

In this search:



all articles will be found containing words beginning with 'garden', such as gardens, gardening, gardener, gardeners, etc.  Similarly, searching for environ*, will return articles containing the words environment, environmental, and environmentalist, among others.

The question mark (?) substitutes for only a single character within a search word.

This example:

will only return articles containing the words garden, or gardens. 

You may also use these wildcards to substitute for a single character, or multiple characters, from within the middle of any search word.  This becomes valuable when seeking multiple word forms in a single search, as these examples will illustrate:

This will locate all articles with the word 'workplace', as well as 'woman', or 'women'.  Without using a wildcard, this would have required two separate searches.

Another use for wildcards is demonstrated here:

This search will return all articles containing the word 'Guantanamo' or 'gitmo' in the title.  This is also helpful when you may be uncertain as to the correct spelling of the search word.

Phrase Searches

You may also have a need to search for an exact phrase, like a book title, or a person's name.  If an exact phrase is desired, it must be enclosed in double quotes, as in this example:



Phrases may also be utilized within Tag: and Title: search strings.

Searching for Images, Groups and other Content

Clicking on any tag on Gather will bring up a 'tag content page' for the selected tag.  This page serves as a doorway to all of the great content on Gather that share that tag, including images, groups, articles, and members.

Note: not all tagged Gather Groups will display on tag content pages, due to a technical issue.

The easiest way to access a tag content page would be to click on the tag desired.  However, if the tag you seek is not on your current page, you will need to locate the tag first.  Probably the simplest method of accomplishing this would be to use your browser, as outlined below: 

In your browsers address bar (where you enter a website address or URL), enter 'gather.com/your desired tag'.  For example, if you are looking for images of roses, you would enter the following:

This will bring up the tag content page for 'roses'.

You may also use article search to locate articles using the desired tag, as outlined in the tag search examples above.  Then, click on the appropriate tag from the list of articles on the search results page.  Sometimes this method may reveal a more appropriate tag that you hadn't thought of previously,

Using all, or a combination of these search techniques can provide you with very powerful abilities to locate content on Gather that meets your needs and interests.