Isys enables searches in a variety of ways. Experienced users tend to favor the command line method, similar to that used by many Web search engines. Were those the only search tools provided, Isys would still be useful. However, the package offers a host of other tools that may be used either on the fly or in standard searches through configuration. Those include fuzzy logic searches, conflation of search terms to their grammatical variants, and synonym rings for equivalent search terms.
Synonym rings are a particularly useful tool for experienced users.
Synonym rings are also useful to link common misspellings to correct terms. While this may not sound like much at first blush, the inability of text retrieval engines to search by date or date range stood for a long time as the critical reason for choosing between them and database search engines. This Isys innovation dramatically improves its usefulness and allows creation of databases using normal word processing or text editor tools. It also allows Isys to work around a common limitation of database applications, the inability to add fields to existing records. While specific features of a database program may still be needed in many situations, Isys may do away with that need in a host of common situations.