1. A computer method of gathering and summarizing information, the method comprising: collecting documents from a plurality of information sources and storing the documents in a storage format; wherein the documents comprise metadata and text that are to be retrieved; converting the documents from the storage format to XML-language documents and storing the XML-language documents in a storage medium; searching for documents according to a search query having at least one term and identifying the documents found in the search; and displaying the documents so as to indicate similarity of the documents to each other according to a clustering algorithm.