Example problematic use cases:

• in a Confluence wiki if one searches for a hostname for example "appserver28nyc" and some pages on the wiki contain the string "appserver28nyc" in a context like "if the server your using is appserver28nyc then blah blah" whereas other pages on the wiki contain the string "appserver28nyc" in a context of like "make sure not to reboot appserver28nyc.dbpool.servers.domain.com since it will" only the former pages will be returned;
• when searching for expressions in code, e.g. "MyClass" or "MyMethod", the search doesn't return pages that contain code like "MyClass.MyMethod()". To find the page, the user needs to search for the full expression "MyClass.Method".

This happens because confluence (like other search engines like google) only searches for whole words, not substrings of words. Most search engines (like google) consider the period character "." to define a break in search tokens so that from an indexing perspective "appserver28nyc.dbpool.servers.domain.com" would be considered as 5 seperate tokens appserver28nyc, dbpool, servers, domain, and com. Confluence does not.

Using wildcards could be a workaround only when searching for the first item in a dot-separated string: "MyClass.MyMethod()" can be found by querying MyClass*, but _*MyMethod()" won't work (as per CONF-9158).