The document discusses binary search trees (BST). It defines a BST as a binary tree where every node contains a key such that the left subtree of a node contains only nodes with keys lesser than the node's key and the right subtree contains only nodes with keys greater than the node's key. It notes that BSTs allow for efficient insertion, search, traversal, and deletion operations with average time complexity of O(log n). However, skewed trees can result in worst-case search time of O(n). To achieve O(log n) search time for all cases, the tree needs to be balanced. AVL trees were introduced to solve this issue by self-balancing after each insertion or deletion.