This behaviour has really confused us, especially because the stemming does not always seem to work as expected. Here are some example results from our Confluence server:

search for alias etc.:
7 for alias
2 for aliases
2 for alias*

search for evidence etc.:
47 for evidence
47 for evidences
3 for evidence*
1 for evidenc
4 for evidenc*

Because our working language is English, but this is not the mother tongue of most of our users, they often use * because they are unsure about the correct English spelling. It would be great if you could implement the solution you suggest above.

We have the same problem reported from a bunch of users in my company. Because we're using the search engine as an essential function.

I really can't believe that this important issue is not even assigned to someone by Atlassian since over 3 years!

This is still not fixed in Confluence 2.10.3. Sorry, but this is not a good job.
Please fix it!

Regards,
Martin

I can still reproduce this on CAC.

Here's another variation: Try searching for "management -manage" I would expect to get management but not manage. Because both the positive and negative terms are stemmed, I get zero results.

In my testing, the word "commit" is a great example:

1. "commit" (no wildcard) matches the literal word "commit" as well as the variations.
2. The search term "commits" (no wildcard) returns all variations on "commit" and the same number of resutls
3. "commit*" matches the literal word "commit" as well as the variations.
4. The search term "commits*" returns a single match for the literal "commits".

So: stemming works, reverse stemming works, stemming with a wildcard works, reverse stemming with a wildcard doesn't.

I've similar problem.

Go to Administration | Global settings | edit configuration
Try to change Jira indexing language from "english" to "other". And repeat you tests.

Here is some description with screens : http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v3.13/configure.html

I've search it for a while, and it is probably connected with Lucene search mechanism which has some special searching functions when searching in English language, but not necessary great when you need exact results with wild cards characters.

Piotr,

Although in this case your comment is applicable to confluence you are probably talking about jira. Confluence also has the same setting for indexing language.

Anatoli.

I've confirmed a another issue with wildcard.

If you use wildcard in your search, the search becomes case-sensitive. i.e.
the result for "C?nfluence" and "c?nfluence" are not the same.

Han