ISYS Desktop Search Software Review

A Newspaper publisher has several years’ worth of newspaper articles in more than 42,000 PDF files. And the company is relying on ISYS software for retrieving information from this vast repository of data (18 GB). The data retrieval is much faster than if they were searching and loading native PDF files.

ISYS:Desktop is a comprehensive enterprise-ready desktop search application to search the contents of individual PCs, LANs and WANs. ISYS desktop search software is light-years ahead of competition with several ground-breaking features like Natural Language, Time limited searches, On-the-fly categorization and results clustering, excellent linguistic support, Result Filtering and a Knowledge Warehouse. The software is lightning fast, accurate, intelligent, easy-to-use and enterprise-ready. Highly recommended.

While most of the popular tools from MSN, Yahoo! and Google are struggling to find a place on the Enterprise desktops, ISYS already has thousands of clients including Law Enforcement agencies, Attorneys, Federal Government agencies and Financial institutions including Goldman Sachs and Australian Stock Exchange.

ISYS:desktop 7 supports more than 30 foreign languages and 140 file formats, including Microsoft Office documents, Internet Cache (IE, Firefox, Netscape), PDF, Outlook PST, Flash (SWF), CHM, ASCII, ZIP, email, attachments, HTML, XML, IFilters, databases (RDBMS via ODBC) and more. You can view file contents even if you don’t have the original application in which the file was created. Documents are indexed at a speed of ~ 40 Mb/min.

ISYS:Desktop provides a variety of search methods to quickly retrieve relevant information. The Menu-Assisted Query is like a visual guide for creating complex searches. Command Based and Web-Style Query enables you to construct Boolean searches, date specific, phrase searching and position specific searches. With Natural Language Query, users can phrase their searches in the form of a question. (remember AskJeeves).

Search results are displayed in the ISYS:desktop window with a preview pane, and hit-to-hit navigation allows users to jump from one instance of a search term to another, eliminating the need for scrolling. You can attach Hyperlinks, Text notes or Graphical annotations to your indexed documents without modifying the original documents. ISYS:desktop automatically creates categories when indexing, based on metadata, folder names, database table names, and related attributes.

Common words (or stop words) like AND, THE, AT, IT which have little meaning are automatically excluded from the index. The Word Wheel feature (“sounds like” or “starts with”) suggest spellings or existence of a word in your index. While searching HTML documents, you can view the source code or the rendered document side by side. ISYS allows you to define a Synonym ring containing words with a similar meaning. Say if you create a “Footwear” ring, a search for shoes or sandals will find all synonyms of Footwear. And the Intelligent Agent automatically tracks that meet a certain custom-defined criteria. (reminds me of Blinkx Smart Folder technology)

ISYS Product screenshots. Download a 14 day trial. When you install ISYS, you must supply a valid full license code which must also be activated.

ISYS Search software is also included in the “The 2005 Software 500” list released by the Software Magazine. The ranking is based on total worldwide software and service revenue for 2004. This includes revenues from software licenses, maintenance and support, training and software-related services and consulting.

Dave Haucke of ISYS Search Software provided us a full copy of ISYS:Desktop 7 with ISYS:spider module for this review.