The document summarizes new features and capabilities in Lucene and Solr 4 for search. Key highlights include Lucene being faster and more memory efficient through improvements like native near real-time support and string handling. Solr 4 adds new features for search, faceting, relevance, indexing and geospatial search. It also improves capabilities for scaling Solr through distribution and dynamic scaling in SolrCloud. The document provides examples of how Lucene and Solr can be applied to problems beyond traditional search like recommendations, backups and indexing of documents.