Is there a plan to make JIRA search better?

[VP]

Hi there

We're using JIRA across our organization and love it. The main search query is really useless though and we can't make sense of its logic. Feels like when entering a search term in the main search field in the header, priority should be given to:

• tasks/bugs/etc where the term is in the summary
• tasks/bugs/etc assigned to me
• tasks/bugs/etc. not closed
• and THEN only everything else

I know JIRA lets you do a detailed search, but right now the default search is so bad it works 0% of the time without adding search parameters.

Any insights as to plans to make this work better?

[Nicolas Degardin]

I know this issue has been opened for years, but the global search is still so frustrating! When I type the exact name of an issue in the global search field, I would expect it to be the first result, not the search results to return loosely related issues, which force me to click on More results and then browse a few pages, before I can find it.

It makes it incredibly hard to ensure I'm not creating a duplicate of an existing issue. Sometimes I'm quite sure that the need we're speaking about was covered by a recently created issue, but I'm just unable to find it back. And when I finally do, it turns out the description or even the title contained exactly the search words I was using.

I understand that there might be some search results weighing based on status, creation time or some other mysterious criteria, but matching title or description words should be prioritized a lot more.

is there anything feasible to adjust the search engine behavior?

[Jeferson]

It is incredible this is still an issue. If anything, it has gotten worse over the years.

[Philip Rubins]

It's insane how terrible the search function is. I'll type in a word or phrase that I know is contained in the ticket I'm looking for, and there's a 90% chance it won't appear in the first set of results.

[JHC]

The current search is really bad with the word stem issues.   At the very least you would expect a product like this to support better .*substring.* to work.   But the tokenizing, word boundary stuff in JIRA search is really terrible.

So if you are searching for parts of a link you are pretty much out of luck.  It would really help if jira full text search was working better.

[Doug Swartz]

I don't have any answer for you regarding planned quick search changes. 

Unlike you, I find the quick search to be useful, although, as you note, the response often requires additional parameters to narrow to what I want. Your question made me go look at the documentation. I didn't realize if the quick search has a project key as the first word, it will scope the search to the specified project.

I can see where your specified search order would be useful in certain circumstances. Personally, for me, I don't think it would be a better default than the current settings.  I'm almost always looking either across the whole enterprise or looking at history when I use general search. When I want to look at issues assigned to me, or open issues, I'm usually looking at a dashboard or kanban board.

[Hamish Moffatt]

I've just tried typing the project key as the first term and it actually made the search much worse. I find hardly any issues when I do this.

Why is the quick search so bad?