how does lucene work?

I understand that you feed it a bunch of files. Perhaps text files. And you can even make categories and stuff.

Then .... it creates an index file?

What sort of stuff does it store in there?

If I have 100 gigs of text data and I feed it into lucene without categorizing it, have I pretty much created my own personal little google?

The Indexing section of the FAQ might help a bit. I have about as much exposure to Lucene as you do Paul.

That helped a little.

Anybody have an idea on what the general algorithm is?