How can you use stop words in exact string search?

[Jonathan Simonoff]

I've discovered that if you can't do an exact word search for a string that includes a stop word.

For example, if you search for:

        "africa and afghanistan"

(with the quotes in the search) where a page contains that exact phrase, you will not find it.  (You can search for the same phrase without the quotes, and it will be found, along with pages that only contain one of the words.)

I assume this is because "and" is a stop word, and thus is not indexed.

I haven't found any way to do this kind of search – searching

        "africa  afghanistan"

also doesn't work.

Is this expected behavior?  Is there a work around?

[Rodrigo Girardi Adami · Accepted solution]

Hi Jonathan,

As far as I know, there's no way to use these words in the search name. This is a limitation from lucene search engine which confluence bundles.

Cheers,

Rodrigo

[Davin Studer]

You could try this. It's not perfect, but it helps a little.

"africa afghanistan"~1

This search ensures that the two words specified must be within a certain number of words of each other to be included.

[Jonathan Simonoff]

Thanks Davin. I'm more concerned with my naive users, who won't know about this, but it is always helpful to have some clever syntax.