Difference between Confluence Search and the LiveSearch macro?

Darryl St. Pierre

I recently created a custom landing page for our Confluence Cloud instance (users did not want the Activity Feed in their face). I made a very basic page with a few links important to staff, targeted messages, and added the LiveSearch macro.

I discovered that LiveSearch and the native Confluence search located on the left sidebar behave differently. Native search includes results from Archived spaces.

Are the differences between the two tools documented anywhere? I was not able to find anything myself.

Is the above behavior expected?

Darryl St. Pierre

Well, I dug into this a little more and found that the "native" search has an Advanced option which allows more targeted searches, such as particular space(s), content types, etc., and also allows searching Archived spaces.

The crazy thing is that searching Archived spaces is disabled by default, so I would not expect results to appear in the basic search.