Problem with search result ordering

[Thomas Rainer]

Hi Community,

we are using confluence as our central knowledgebase. From time to time I noticed that the order of the search results where not that what we expected in terms of prioritizing more important articles. As an example (in german) I can show you what I mean.

When I start a search from our startpage where we placed a "livesearch" makro, I get the following suggestions for the result:

In my opinion the search algorithm has some issues, since the first and the second result are "bad" pages that simply contains a link and nothing else. But my expected result, the third, would contain a lot of text where also the search keywords are used multiple times. Even the kewords itself are not an exact match on the first two results.

That someone understand that algorithm?
Is there a way to push some articles up. It also seems that if an article has more likes, that does not affect the search result position.

A Knowledge Base without a reliable search is only worth 50%.

Btw. When I click on "more results" my expected article goes even down to the fifth position.
We are running the latest on premise Version of Confluence. The issue was in older versions exactly the same.

Hope that someone can help.
Thank you

Regards
Simon

[Tobias Anstett (K15t) · Accepted solution]

Hi Simon,

There is no way to configure this in Confluence out-of-the-box.

However for server (if you are a developer) you can write a custom app implementing a Lucene boosting strategy as described in https://developer.atlassian.com/server/confluence/lucene-boosting-strategy-module/

Best,
Tobias

[Thomas Rainer]

Thank you for your fast reply Tobias!

That was the hint that I was searching for.. Seems that there is a plugin developer that addresses exactly that with his "search boost plugin".

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1210798/search-boost-plugin-for-confluence?hosting=server&tab=overview

furthermore I found a related Issue to my problem. There are issues with "exact matches" in search results that can be fixed with this plugin:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1218947/exact-match-boost?hosting=server&tab=overview

or by changing the indexing language from german to english.

Thank you!

Lets see if it helps.

Regards
Simon

[Tobias Anstett (K15t)]

Awesome :-)

[Thomas Rainer]

But one thing is still not clear for me.. Why is the result in the "as you type" result different than on the results page when I click on "more results"?