What a disappointing response.

Being multi-tenanted you could choose to take this opportunity to fix this for everyone in one fell swoop, but instead it's a reason for leaving basic search functionality in a broken state for everyone?

It's this kind of thinking that made my employer dump Confluence recently.

You can't use this excuse as a reason not to fix things or you'll never overcome that inertia and make the tool fit for purpose.

With regards to this ticket we cannot provide the option for Lucene tokenisation. We have a multi-tenanted environment. As the config is applied once for all tenants, we can’t apply it on per site basis. If you were watching the ticket for an update to that problem - sadly its a 'won't fix'.

However we may be able to help with the stemming issues. I'll review this with the team and come back when I have an update.

As a general update, we remain committed to improving Confluence search. We continue to test and improve relevance. And we have large scale experience changes coming (currently testing these in Beta with 10 customers: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-Admins-articles/Beta-sign-up-closed-Introducing-Unified-Search-the-new-and/ba-p/2885113)

As an update to my comment below, I've also updated the status of other search related tickets

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-200 - fixed
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-710 - fixed
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-714 - won't fix
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-4428 - not related to search (but fixed)
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-568 - fixed
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-842 - fixed
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-611 - not yet fixed

Hi 93b03c68bba8 and folks watching this ticket.

There are a few related tickets:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-200
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-710
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-714
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-4428
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-568
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-842
 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-611
In the New Year I'll meet with Atlassian search relevance teams to understand next steps and ETAs for these

Thanks

Owen

Another +1 from me for exact string searching through page body text. We automate the generation of read-only technical documentation to Confluence, and the lack of this feature is becoming a real pain. Searching throughout a Confluence space containing around 200 pages will sometimes find a piece of text reliably such as "cus_webenabled", but for other text such as "Related_Worktags_Data" it just returns no results at all - perhaps it splits it into tokens and considers the individual words too common?  Is there any target timescale for introducing a fix please? Thanks

Thank you very much for the comments, 95aa03ae8d8f and 2eaf001e0aec.

Owen brought this one to my attention and the reason behind the label being added, is that, while we do plan to solve this in Rovo Search, we also do plan on resolving this in Confluence Search.

This means that we do not expect customers to pay for Rovo in order to have the bug fixed.

Apologies for any confusion.

Hi David, Adam,

I agree - and we do plan to resolve this in Confluence.

Let me work with the support team to understand why this tag was added.

Thanks

Owen

Agreed, 2eaf001e0aec. Thi$ i$ not an add-on-f€atur€. It's a decade+ fundamental bug to core functionality. If any money was to be changing hands here, it should be Atlassian discounting our licensing for failure to provide core functionality.

I notice the solved-by-ai-rovo label has been added.

This is therefore not solved for people who haven't been upsold the Rovo product at $20+/user/month on top of their Confluence subscription.

So please don't close this issue as it's still not solved by Confluence Cloud, which is the product that this 15+ year old issue was originally opened on.

It would also make a lot of sense to move this back to the Confluence Cloud project rather than this AI project.

Please make this a top priority, what use is a document management system with a search functionality that cannot even use literal strings? Try to search for a domain name or a date and the result includes every page there is!

This application is an internal laughing stock as it is right now!

+1 exact substring matches (including 'special characters') should be the number 1 result. Currently we observe they are ~7th result returned, and other potentially misleading results (not exact substrings) are ranked higher. This is a major blocker for us to migrating everything over to confluence as we have limited confidence in its search capabilities.

we need this for many cases. we have extensive documentation and we get mostly false results because of the tokenisation.

We use confluence for our application , development and training documentation.

This documentation frequently contains code or code constructs. e.g

if string-variable > ""
then .

Our developers need to be able to search for > "" to find the meaning of this construct.

Please make it possible for me to search for exact text "PT-SXD6E-001". This does not work

This seems like it should have been a standard feature in 1995

+1

+1

Very much needed for finding out of date documentation and replacing entries with new documentation

Post 08/Dec/2022: Christmas. The time of miracles!

Update 24/10/2023: We were obviously naughty boys and girls last Christmas and didn't receive the working search functionality that we'd put on our Christmas list.

Have you all been good this year?

I feel like I dare not hope! 

And...

SHORT TERM BACKLOG
A fix for this issue is required, and will be prioritised in the near future. This is because it’s more severe or pervasive than other issues.

Is something happening after ~14 years?

O.....M.....G.....

'confirmed-bug' label added!

Dare we dream...?

We are currently using Confl. Server, but as we will migrate to Cloud soon I'd realy appriciate if this searching issue would be fixed in Could then. As we realy struggle also, with how Confluence is searching.

For exampl:
We would like Confluence to search for "CP20-0196" as we write it (the - included).
And with "CP20-019*" I'd like to get a results, from CP20-0190 up to CP20-0199" 

My usecase - we've changed the slack channel where we handle certain types of support. The previous support channel was a common word, think #support. I can't search for all the pages where this channel is referenced to update to the new channel name because the word is used in many other contexts. Since the # comes first, I can't use a wildcard workaround either.

Adding my voice to the list. We need the ability to search for exact matches. 

In other news, it would be of particular interest to understand how this is classed as a bug in 2009 and we still have the same issue in 2022. Is anyone from Atlassian even looking at these tickets anymore? Or should we start reporting bugs on twitter?

Was surprised to learn this basic and essential functionality was not standard as it is in most search tools.  "Search for me" should only include those results, not Search, for, and me separately.  It's easy enough to enter those words separately if that's what someone wants.  Thanks for listening, though based on the age of this thread not sure if it's something actually being considered.

I've not heard of 'calendly' and Google doesn't give me much to go on so I'm not clicking that link personally but here's hoping that this ticket won't make it to its teenage years.

Great to hear it officially acknowledged as a bug, btw.

Hi everyone. 
My name is Sheng An Zhang and I am a product manager on the search team. 

Our team is looking to focus on fixing fundamental issues with our search. This bug is something my team is now looking into and will be an area of higher priority for us. While I cannot provide you with a concrete timeline, we will be actively looking to fix this and related issues.

As we are beginning to explore this problem, we are also looking for your help in ensuring we build the right thing for you. If you are willing to participate in a short customer interview to chat about this (or search in general), please find a time that suits you here.

**Otherwise, please do not hesitate to shoot me an email at szhang4@atlassian.com.

We really want to thank you for all your patience and feedback!

Search for "release plan" will produce hits for pages that have a phrase where the words "release" and "plan" exist but not in that specific order. What an awful UX! And this is over a decade old. Also impacts Server version, and nearly 300 customers having this issue in cloud. What does it take for Atlassian to actually address a terrible UX?!

This affects my team especially as we want to build a searchable database and want the flexibility of exact searching.

Here's some advise Atlassian Support gave me when I complained I couldn't search for things. I find Tree Search is better than their out-of-the-box search. 

1) Try to use more accurate phrases in the search. For example, you can use "Object reference not set" in the search instead of Object, reference etc.
2) Use Tree search for Confluence plugin. This is a free plugin available from Atlassian labs and it will help in more accurate phrase search including CQL. Also, the results will be available in a tree format for easier search.
3) Explore plugin like Bulk Action tools to do a one-time labelling operation. This plugin has a free trial period also.

Eventually we got jaded and nowadays we just get to know where things are rather than rely on the search..

Happy 12th birthday 🎂 😢

It's now somewhat over 12 months since this comment from 28/Jun/2019:

I'm happy to share that we'll be addressing this issue as part of our overhaul of the current search experience and search ranking which is on our roadmap for the next 12 months.

I'd love an update on how search ranking is coming along.

And to think that I missed this ticket's birthday by three days. Happy birthday to us not being able to perform an exact search in a search engine for a repository that only contains things we want to search for.

Why is this ticket 11 years old?!?  This is so fundamental... our organization is growing and as we bring more documents into Confluence this issue makes it harder and harder to find what we're looking for.  I'm sure that if we knew that search was so broken and that Atlassian had so little concern for this that we would have made different choices....

@Jonathan Laliberte - exactly! Agree totally with your comment.

Yeah, this is annoying. Even just for process documentation it's a pain.. I expect a quoted string to return only things with that exact phrase. For example "out of stock" shouldn't be returning pages that contain "out" and "stock" - this is frustrating.

@geoff.infield Agreed! Absolute show stopper for 95+% of all cases where an organization needs Wiki (I know! Conflunce isn't really a Wiki.) I've moved on. Sorry to see so many still suffering...

Alas, my experience is that often people just stop using Confluence's Search and say little or nothing. If pressed they'll say "I don't use it. It just doesn't work". Users suffering in silence probably accounts for why this NEVER gets addressed.

I'm in my fourth decade of software development and this is the worst example of not knowing or caring about what the end user needs I've yet seen.  Searching for 'addresssearch-ejb.jar' should NOT match a hundred pages containing 'EJB' and a thousand containing "JAR". Advanced search is a joke. Worst of all, this insanity is a secret - even if the search said "the following search terms were excluded" it'd be better but I only found out how terribly it mutilates my search text in the 2013 thread that referenced this ticket. 

Not only is it still open seven years later, but it's been open for ELEVEN years.  I can't in all conscience recommend this handicapped product to anyone - this is literally killing us, we're in a bad position thanks to not being able to search a repository that only exists for that purpose. 

Happy 11th birthday 🎂 😢

Hi everyone, 

I have been working on our internationalization issues and found that this issue is not related to or cannot be address by the internationalization team. This functionality is owned and managed by our Search functionality team. I see there is ticket open here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-14910 as mentioned above. I will be transitioning this particular ticket to the Confluence Cloud team as this is not an internationalization issue.

I am sorry this issue is causing pain and I will also monitor this issue with the search team myself internally. 

Many thanks,

Melanie

Our company is looking to switch to confluence for our service center documentation, but if we can't search for a name like 'svr-003-abc' without getting 99+ results, then I am afraid the service department will not join us on confluence.

Sometime i want time to learn.

It's unbelievable that you cannot search for exact text in Confluence.

alwang It's great that this bug has now been acknowledged by Atlassian and looks like you plan to work on it too. Please don't forget to fix up CONFSERVER-14910 too. That issue has been sitting there unloved for over 10 years now.

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your patience and being so vocal with regards to availability of this feature in Confluence Cloud. We acknowledge that this is a bug in Confluence Cloud.

I'm happy to share that we'll be addressing this issue as part of our overhaul of the current search experience and search ranking which is on our roadmap for the next 12 months.

Thanks again for your patience.

Best

Alice Wang
Senior Development Team Lead, Confluence Cloud

How is this still an unresolved issue?

Searching for "to be updated" returns 10 false positives before the first correct result.

Yes, The capability of searching for exact phrases is ESSENTIAL.

Yes sir I will

Search is indeed bad, results are poor, any special character is ignored, trying to find pages that mention an email is impossible.

I'll try to be here at March 13 to sing the 10th birthday anniversary of this issue.

Please do something about this looong lasting issue - either let Admins set the Search-Algorithm or push something useful into the main codebase for the next version.

How hard can it be to improve it? What really keeps you from resolving this issue?

You know that this issue was created 2009 - Hey Atlassian-Team!! - You do not want any issue to be unresolved for 10 full years in one of your main products - don't you?

So please do something before 2019 hits you!!

I cannot believe that "exact text search" in a system whose purpose is to store technical documents is something that would be up for a vote and persuasion... This just seems like an obvious omission that leads to a lot of confusion by people sent to look up documents containing specific, well-defined terms.

This is a BUG and should have been treated as such by Atlassian in the first place. Users should always have the option of searching for an exact phrase. It is a joke that a "suggestion" could be open for nearly nine years now and still be completely ignored by Atlassian. Time for everyone to vote with their feet and find alternative software ...

This would be very nice to have, But as this ticket is nearly a decade old If you could mark if you don't plan to do it as such it would be appreciated.

Another highly annoying issue just passing its 8th anniversary without even being assigned. GRRRRRR!  Has Atlassian no respect for its users?

Slammed into this broken feature yet again .

For reasons well beyond this one issue, if it were in my purview, I'd have Confluence dumped in favor of a more stable product whose developers recognize and fix such egregious issues - and "you can buy a plugin" isn't the all too frequent retort.

I won't be back to comment again. To the extent I must I'll use the product; unless I am able to effect change.

@Nando Neck, I hate to quibble but Confluences' exact search is broken. We are not discussing some useful new feature(s).  Beyond that though, I see value in what you say. An exact search feature that provides the "stop word" and "stemming" modifiers could sometimes be useful.

I think this feature could be really useful.Although it shouldn't primarily replace the "stop word" and "stemming" but should be added as optional search (a multiselect checkbox "stop words, stemming" / "exact wording" should be added somwhere in the administrative section to select one or both indexing mechanisms) by an additional search syntax like for example 'search for the exact wording' different from the "stop words / stemming".

For those who can't see the image, knowing that the page I seek includes the EXACT phrase "of the packages", I performed the following:

Search: "of the packages"
Yields:
  66 results. Beginning with these
  - is a package
  - and consume packages
  - NuGet package

... page after page of results that do not match my "EXACT PHRASE". Search abandoned

although I cannot see the picture from Scott I agree