The major features found in Lucene

• An inverted index for efficient retrieval of documents by indexed terms. The
same technology supports numeric data with range queries too.
• A rich set of chainable text analysis components, such as tokenizers and
language-specific stemmers that transform a text string into a series of terms
(words).
• A query syntax with a parser and a variety of query types from a simple term
lookup to exotic fuzzy matching.
• A good scoring algorithm based on sound Information Retrieval (IR)
principles to produce the more likely candidates first, with flexible means to
affect the scoring.
• Search enhancing features like:
°° A highlighter feature to show query words found in context.
°° A query spellchecker based on indexed content or a supplied
dictionary.
°° A "more like this" feature to list documents that are statistically
similar to provided text.