You could send search requests. The reason I remember this is because I was writing a Gopher server which had a built-in search engine.
I say "I was building" rather than "built" because two things happened: someone showed me a graphical web browser that actually was usable, and whomever owned Gopher wanted to charge money for using v2 of the protocol (I think?). So I ditched all the gopher code I had written and made an HTTP-server instead.
update: I think it was Goper+, not Gopher v2 which was the new version
I say "I was building" rather than "built" because two things happened: someone showed me a graphical web browser that actually was usable, and whomever owned Gopher wanted to charge money for using v2 of the protocol (I think?). So I ditched all the gopher code I had written and made an HTTP-server instead.
update: I think it was Goper+, not Gopher v2 which was the new version