These days if you need to implement search you tend to grab an off the shelf solution such as Elasticsearch, Solr, FAST, Google Search appliance or a SAAS provider (EpiServer Find, hosted solr/elasticsearch services). All of these options are great at taking data blobs (json/xml/documents) and making them queryable and are absolutely recommended over rolling your own solution. However to get the most out of these it really helps to understand just a little bit of what these services are actually doing to your data. In this talk I'll explain how Lucene takes your data, stores it and molds it into a shape that can be queried over at insane speeds. Showing what it does in the background: tokenizing, analyzing, inverted indices and how this is of importance when writing queries and facetting your data.