The document discusses the Boyer-Moore string searching algorithm. It works by preprocessing the pattern string and comparing characters from right to left. If a mismatch occurs, it uses two heuristics - bad character and good suffix - to determine the shift amount. The bad character heuristic shifts past mismatching characters, while the good suffix heuristic looks for matching suffixes to allow larger shifts. The algorithm generally gets faster as the pattern length increases, running in sub-linear time on average. It has applications in tasks like virus scanning and database searching that require high-speed string searching.