Confluence Search: How to force a real exact match?

Sven
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May 2, 2013

Hello,

when I search in confluence (normal search) and I type "ticker" the first page of hits does not include "ticker" but "ticket" or "tickets". Only the very last one hit shows a page where really the correct word "ticker" appears.

How can I force "exact match" to get only search results of pages which really contain the word as it was typed?

If it is not possible, perhaps give a hint about a (free) plugin?

Thanks in advance for any hint.

Sven

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Daniel Borcherding
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May 2, 2013

Hello Sven,

From the following document we see that using the "normal" search in Confluence tries to make an exact match. Normal is here defined as not the search in the upper right of the wiki.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Searching+Confluence

We have another document on search syntax inside of Confluence.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Search+Syntax

Taking a quick look over our internal bug tracking system it looks like we have an imporvement for exact search rolled into Confluence 5.2. What version of Confluence are you using?

Noumenon72 September 8, 2016

I'm using 5.9 and even the full search (which I get to by hitting enter in the upper right search) finds "add cron" when I search "add to cron".

dfranklin April 1, 2021

Y'know, this is still broken. Search for "product release" will also return pages with phrases that have those words but not in that specific order. 

Seriously, we can't actually perform an exact phrase search at all. What a UX disappointment!

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rswelker July 26, 2021

I believe this (#14910) is the underlying, long-standing issue and that Atlassian is simply not interested in fixing this very poor user experience.

1 vote
Mick Davidson
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May 2, 2013

Sven,

When you say 'normal search', do you mean the global search from the field in the top right of the wiki, or a space search, which is run from the left above the tree menu?

Cheers.

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