How the search module prioritize the answers ? Can it be based on Articles Ratings ?

Question

As a Confluence User, I would like to have articles with the best ratings from the community poping up in first place in the result of my Search.

As far as I know, there are 3 ways to rate an Article in Confluence :

1) Use the default "Like/Unlike" attribute at the bottom of each page,

2) Use the "Rate Search Macro" ( to be configured on each page)

3) Use the "Content Rating & Feedback for Confluence" add-on (to be installed on the server)

Question : Which of the 3 ratings above can be taken into consideration by the Confluence Search Module ?

Brant Schroeder · Answer

@François Combeau Welcome to the Atlassian community

I think you need to look at how the search relevance system works.  There is not a ton of information on everything it does but you can gain a little insights through the pages listed below.

* https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/revamping-confluence-cloud-search 
* https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-do-i-understand-the-ranking-of-confluence-s-search-results-785614686.html 
* https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/ranking-of-search-results-1188406620.html#:~:text=Confluence%20will%20rank%20these%20matching,select%20the%20item%20you%20need.

Confluence basically looks at the following three items and they carry the most weight:

Document Age

Newer Documents will be given a slightly higher score than older documents. Keep in mind that doesn't mean that newer documents will appear first, just that they give a slightly higher weight.

Title

Confluence will look at the number of words within a title (excluding minor words, such as "the", "and" etc), and will check how many times a word appears in the title.

Content

As with the title, Confluence will look at the number of words within the content, and check how many times the number of words appears in the content.

After that in other articles that are out there they discuss how recently viewed documents, like/unlke, etc. has impacts on search.  I do not know what weight they carry.  Confluence has not presented too much information into this in their documentation.  Because of this it is best to focus on the three areas above to help improve search results.