Help improve Confluence Search!

[Alli Shea]

Hi Community,

I’m Alli, a Product Manager on Confluence Cloud.

Our team wants to know more about how you find information within Confluence.

Specifically, we’re interested in getting to know how you filter or refine your search results, and how we can improve that experience for you.

We would appreciate you sharing feedback and input about this topic via a brief survey.

You can fill out the survey here. It should take about 3-4 minutes to complete.

If you’re open to providing additional feedback about some of our early concepts and prototypes, please provide you contact information at the end of the survey.

Thank you in advance for your time!

Your feedback is appreciated and helps make Confluence better.

Alli

[Sandra Zingerle]

Hi @Alli Shea ,

we would like to take part at the survey, but we don't have a Googleaccount in our company, only Microsoft. 

Do you have a solution for this?

Regards, Sandra

[Alli Shea]

Hi @Sandra Zingerle ! Thanks for your willingness to participate. You should be able to fill it out now after we've changed the settings. Let me know!

[Sandra Zingerle]

Hi @Alli Shea 

I'm still not able to fill it out with the microsoftaccount. Dont't worry any more, I filled it out with my private google account. 

Great questions!

[Summer.Hogan]

I filled out the survey for you. Great questions and thanks for improving this feature! 

[Alli Shea]

Thanks, @Summer_Hogan ! Appreciate your feedback. 

[Carter Chen]

Hey, your search feature is kinda brittle and buggy...

I have a page that has two different instances of the exact phrase: 

ERROR: THESE PACKAGES DO NOT MATCH THE HASHES FROM THE REQUIREMENTS FILE

The page is: https://confluence.prod.aws.jpmchase.net/confluence/display/AMIMANBA/How+to+%60pip+install%60+a+package+with+hashes+that+do+no+match

When I copy/paste this phrase into the Confluence search bar, my page does not come up.

It does not matter if I filter by my team's space or not (AM-IMA-NBA).

According to the documentation for advanced search, we can enclose a string in quotes to search for that exact phrase: 

When I enclose it in quotes, I get the same result--my page does not show up... nothing shows up: 

The only way I can get the result I want is to convert the string to lower case:

And if I enclose this lowercase string in quotes, once again, there are no results: 

The only reason I can think of why this is happening... the search feature cannot handle uppercase strings. It might be interpreting the various words as keywords, rather than as a string to be searched for. If this is the case, then it should be documented... but nothing in the advanced search documentation would lead one to think this. The documentation quite clearly states that if you enclose a string in quotes, then it will search for that exact string, but this is clearly not what is happening under the hood. 

Please fix this 'bug' or update your documentation accordingly!

[SG]

I was excited until I saw that this survey is only for confluence cloud.

Anything similiar planned for on-prem? The search for on-prem confluence is the biggest hindrance in getting people to use it. All we really need is real fulltext search.

[Dave Liao]

Confluence 8.0 finally offers tweaks to the way search works - see its release notes!

[Gaby]

Hello Alli,
I have sent the survey, but as it is - I have forgotten something else....

In my wish of the possibility for horizontal search bar, it would also be great if I as admin could design the search bar (search fields) individually per area. Can you please still include this? Thank you very much.

PS: I think the idea of redesigning the search function - search bar, is excellent. Good luck with it.

greetings - Gaby

[Horst Buck]

Searching in Confluence is really one of the greatest problems in Confluence (DataCenter).

My Opinion: If you can bring it more Google-Like - without the Filters for Spaces etc.  and a bigger Mask for the Search-Results - it would be easier for the Users and we get a better Usability and more happy Users ;-)).

Greetings Horst

[Derya Ozdemir _Appfire_]

Thanks so much for this, the Search feature can really be improved! I filled out the survey, and thanks for improving this feature.

[Norman Cates]

How about just making it work?

I should be able to search for text with wildcards across my entire space.

I should be able to search for URLs.

Using an asterisk should work for strings. It doesn't. 

The documentation is more concerned with isolating the areas that the search is taking place in (spaces, people, blogs etc etc) than telling us how to use the search. 

How is this search function allowed to exist in such an incompetent state?

[Carter Chen]

Really tho. It's an embarrassment. Can't tell you how many times someone has told me 'just search for it in Confluence' and it is not possible to find said doc. Really text search is the only feature that actually needs to work in a documentation app...

[Dave Liao]

What version of Confluence are you using?

Though I agree, default searching is a little lacking, and it takes a bit (er...) of patience to find what you want.

[Norman Cates]

Version 7.13.7

Server / local. Whatever its being called. Not in the cloud

But the fact that Confluence is over 10 years old, and the search is STILL pretty dodgy, is very concerning. (I say, understating the situation vastly)

[Angela L_]

The fact that there are highly requested 14-year-old tickets about the terrible Confluence search, and they've done nothing to fix it, really says a lot. 

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-14910

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-69222