How do I perform an exact match search?

[Joel Newton]

I am searching our instance of Confluence for the word "Esper" so I search for "Esper" (in quotes).

Many of the results I get are for pages with "esp" but not "Esper". This seems wrong. Can anything be done to exclude these results? Thanks.

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems · Accepted solution]

@Joel Newton, 

Atlassian's documentation on searches indicates that using quotation marks will return exact matches.

If this isn't working properly, perhaps raising a ticket with Atlassian would be appropriate.

[Joel Newton]

Thanks. I'll do that.

[MM]

The year is 2022. I have just read through a ticket that was created in 2009 classing this issue as a bug. It is still a bug as the suggested 'fix' written in the documentation does not work.

In short, there is currently no way to search for an exact match.

[Andy Folland]

My $0.02 here.
Having just wasted half an hour trying to use the alleged "Search for an exact match" - my question then - why doesn't use of the double quotes actually do that? (i.e. search for an exact match).

As an example, searching for "intentionally" includes pages with "intentional".
That is clearly NOT an exact match then, is it?

I'm amazed at myself for managing to type this in without any swearing.

[Nikolay Nenkov]

yes, searching for a strings is amazingly hard :D 

[Valente Vidal]

2023 this still doesn't work , come on this is basic functionality 

[Lucy Minato]

@Joel Newton good luck with your exact match searching, it's been a problem in Confluence for a while for a few of us. Here's some reading for you:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Search-like-a-pro-with-the-new-advanced-search-experience/td-p/1183423
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-69222

:-)

[Andy Folland]

Come on Atlassian folks - surely it's high time you sorted this out.

[Andy Folland]

@atlassian: come on folks, time to get a  grip here.

[Kevin Ryan]

Throwing your customers under the bus again, Atlassian, aren't you? A verbatim search option is critical to reducing overpoweringly cluttered search results — a major complaint about Confluence at my company. I don't expect you will ever take your blinders off, though.