Why are user profiles widgets on pages not being included in search?

Question

To recreate the issue: create a page with a user profile populated by a user. Search for the user's name (maybe first name, only last name) and note that the page never shows up in the search results.

Marc Downer · Answer

I'm not using an excerpt macro. I do get why that would only find the original content page.

However, I would think a user profile macro would be searchable content and bring back pages where user profiles are listed on those pages. Otherwise, why should we use them?

Barbara Szczesniak · Answer

@Marc Downer Are you using the Quick Search or the Advanced Search?

According to this page of the documentation (https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/search-for-pages-and-posts/):

* With a Quick Search, you

Enter the name of a page, blog post, whiteboard, person, file/attachment, or space, and choose from the list of options displayed. Items are ordered with the most recently updated first. When selecting a person, you can view their profile.

This search looks for the term in the page title, rather than in the content of the page.

With the Advanced Search, you can set the Type filter to All content or Pages to search within the content of the page.

If you have already tried the Advanced Search and it doesn't give the expected result, there may be something to do with it being in a macro, rather than content typed on the page.

The page I linked to above does not mention this specifically, but, if this is the case, I would expect that searching for text that is included in an excerpt would only find the page where the Excerpt macro is defined and not the page where the Excerpt Include macro is used.

Marc Downer · Answer

Yes, that is correct.