The document provides an overview of full text search and different approaches to implementing it including wild card database queries, using database-specific full text search functionality, leveraging third party search engines, and using text indexing libraries. It focuses on using Lucene, describing how to index and search text data with Lucene including the key classes, steps, and options involved. It also demonstrates Lucene functionality through code examples and mentions other search technologies that can be used beyond Lucene like Solr, Compass and ElasticSearch.