How to search within a single channel?

[Clint]

Hi all, I'm new here, so if I missed a 101 somewhere, point me over to that ;)

I'm trying to search for terms within, say, the Confluence community channel. If I use the federated search (search bar at top-right of UI) it returns results but I can't tell which product/group a result belongs to (until I actually view the article). 

Any help would be appreciated.

Clinton

[Monique vdB · Accepted solution]

@Clint, as one workaround you can add "&location=category:NAME" to your search URL (this is mentioned in the FAQ so you can find it in the future). For example, this search should get you "sharepoint" results from the Confluence collection only:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?advanced=false&allow_punctuation=false&q=sharepoint&location=category:confluence

[Clint]

Hi @Monique vdB That's great thanks for letting me know!

Just a tip for anyone even slightly less web-aware than I am:

1. Perform your search first (top-right of the page)
2. After you get the results page, add "&location=category:NAME" to the end of the URL (replacing 'NAME' with the channel name: Jira, Trello, etc.)

[Sorry, over-explaining is an occupational hazard]

Clint

[Monique vdB]

We have added this ability! There is now a search bar on every collection home page that searches within the collection. 😊

[Kevan Lin]

This is a great suggestion @Clint ! Unfortunately, this currently not a supported feature. As one of the UX designers working on the community specifically, I wanted to ask you a follow-up question. If you had a magic wand, could you walk me through the ideal scenario on how something like would work? 

[Clint]

Hi Kevan, sure. I gave it a bit of thought last week so it's fresh in my mind.

I was looking for strategic content around how to use Confluence for my work (authoring and content management) and specifically around how others might have migrated from Word + SharePoint (to Confluence).

I looked first through the public website (Confluence features, capabilities, etc).  I didn't find anything that spoke clearly to the value proposition of migrating so I came over to forums. I tried 2 things: Federated search (as per my post) and Search Alerts. 

In both approaches I used search terms similar to the following:

+ Word (massive result set as "word" is a commonly used word, my focus was MS-Word)

+ CMS, structured authoring,

+ Content (also a big result set)

3 UI options IMO:

1- add a channel selector in Settings>Search Terms configuration; OR

2- See idea2 (attached), adding another navigation activity (search).

3- See idea3 (attached), adding a search filter to a results set.

Thanks for listening and good luck with it! 

[Clint]

[Kevan Lin]

This is awesome! Thank you @Clint  for spending the time to help us improve experiences for not just you but others who use the community to learn more about Atlassian products. I'll be adding this to a heap of improvements to look into further. Thanks. 

In terms of your search for migrating from Word + SharePoint to Confluence, where are you in your journey with that? You may want to create a new question in the Confluence collection as someone there might be able to help you out with any specific questions around migration. 

[Clint]

Hi Kevan, the potential migration is still on the backburner, just trying to get a few urgent release docs out. 

I'll do as you suggest, put out a question into the ether. That way if anyone has experiences and respond in the meantime, I'll be ready to take that up in a few weeks. Thanks for that!