The Symbolics manual was an 8,000 page document that was represented in a 10,000 node "hyperdocument" containing 23,000 links in all. The entire manual required 10 MB of storage space, which was a fair amount in 1985. The Symbolics Document Examiner used a hierarchical structure, which differed from other experimental hypertext systems.
Symbolics Document Examiner users could add bookmarks, which allowed returning to specific items easier; this method was later incorporated in graphical web browsers. The system also supported on-line substring searching. The biggest drawback to the Symbolics Document Examiner was that users could not make changes to any information or to a document's navigation.