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I’m working on an app for iOS and I asked this question. There’s an answer which leads me to a whole bunch of posts related to something called “full text search”. Based on the reading I’ve done, I can guess that it has something to do with searching an entire set of text some way as opposed to only searching keywords.
How does indexing speed up FTS, and why is it any more specific than keyword searching?
Keyword search searches for documents based on keywords that have been assigned to the document by some other means (a person or a program that analyzes and categorizes the document). Full text search searches the entire document for the words or phrases you’re looking for.
Imagine that you’re searching for information about steam trains. Keyword search would only locate documents that have been tagged with the keywords “steam” and “train”. Full text search, on the other hand, looks for documents that contain the words “steam” and “train” somewhere in the text.
That’s the basic difference. The Wikipedia article that Nacht posted is a good place to start on more detail.