This document provides an overview of searching and Apache Lucene. It discusses what a search engine is and how it builds an index and answers queries. It then describes Apache Lucene as a high-performance Java-based search engine library. Key features of Lucene like its powerful query syntax, relevance ranking, and flexibility are outlined. Examples of indexing and searching code in Lucene are also provided. The document concludes with a discussion of Lucene's scalability and how it can handle increasing query rates, index sizes, and update rates.