Confluence Search behaviour

[Kris Dewachter]

Hi,

I'm having some issues with the Confluence search behaviour. This occurs both in the general search and the "live search" widget.

I have a page structure with a number of knowledge base articles (pages). The page titles are constructed as follows:

Main page

• ABC-1 - this is KB article 1
• ABC-2 - This is another KB article
• ....
• ABC-101 - Some more knowledge on this page
• ABC-102 - Even more wisdom
• .....

When a person performs a search on ex. "ABC-1". (a lot of people know the codes by heart), it will suggest a lot of pages, except the correct one (ABC-1). It will suggest ABC-2, 102, 101, .....  but NOT ABC-1

In other cases, when the customer enters ex. ABC-101, then it will find the correct page and even display it on top of the search result.

Does anyone have an insight on the correct behaviour of the Confluence search? I presume that the "-" sign will be causing most of my issues.

Is there any way to reconfigure or tweak the search for better search results?

Best regards,

Kris

[Kris Dewachter · Accepted solution]

After contacting Atlassian Support I found out that there is already a bug ticket registered for this behaviour. 

The issue seems to be caused by Lucene Tokenization, which blocks an exact text search when using some characters like hyphens.

In other words, "-" is treated as the special operator for negation. So, searching for "ABC -1" is the same as searching for "ABC NOT 1".

[Darshanaa (ServiceRocket)]

Hi @Kris Dewachter ,

Have you tried Space Manager for Confluence?

The search function helps you locate the exact document within the space.

It also helps to give you a visual view of your entire space(s) so that you're able to clearly see your Confluence structure. 

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on the app. Please feel free to leave any questions/feedback here. 

Thanks & have a great day! :)

[Kris Dewachter]

Hi @Mihai Schwarz ,

Thanks for your reply.

I tried adding the keys (ABC-1) as labels but that did not bring any improvement.

Also, manual re-indexing has been disabled on Cloud.

Best regards,

Kris

[Mihai Schwarz]

Hi @Kris Dewachter ,

Have you tried adding keywords from the title as labels or simply adding labels to refine the available searches?

Additionally I suggest you should trigger a content indexing (outside of working hours) if you have lots of pages.