Searching for stuff seems like it should be easy; after all, it’s something we do every day. Take your favourite search engine, type something in the box, click search, and you’re done! All the answers you are looking for, ready for you to consume. With these systems, you generally have no idea what answers you should be getting; just that you’ll get something. Your universe of knowledge is now whatever Google just told you. When the person searching knows the results they should be getting, producing the expected search results is much harder. This talk is an introduction to text searching: some search terminology, some basics on how text search engines work, the questions you should ask at the start, and some of the common problems you run into when designing search systems.