The Knowledge Base Utilizes the Lucene Search Engine

Search using keywords to limit results

Avoid searching full sentences, because Results could incorrectly exclude an existing Article.  For example, "How to provide access to reports" vs "report access".  The Knowledge Base search looks to match each word, therefore, the "How to..." search would not match an Article with "Adding/Removing Report Restrictions" in the Title.

Matched phrase search

Use double quotes to search for content that contains the phrase 'cheese one', or a phrase where 'cheese' and 'one' are the major words:

"cheese one"

Note: Confluence will ignore common words (stop words), including 'and', 'the', 'or', and more, even if they are included within double quotes. 

For example:

1. Searching for "cheese one" returns only pages in which 'one' appears as the first word after 'cheese'.
2. Searching for "the one" returns all pages containing 'one' because 'the' is a stop word.

Wildcard searches

You can use one or more wildcard characters in your search. For example, you could search for http*.atlassian.* to find https://www.atlassian.com or http://www.atlassian.jp.

Leading wildcards

Lucene doesn't allow wildcards at the beginning of your search, but you can format your search as a regular expression as a workaround. For example, you can't search for *hum* or ?hum*, as they begin with a wildcard, but you can search for /.*hum.*/ and find things like hum, human, and inhumane.

Wildcards can either replace a single character in your search, or multiple characters.

Single character

To replace a single character in your search, use a question mark (?) as a wildcard, For example, to search for 'butter', 'bitter', 'better', or 'batter'. 

b?tter

Multiple characters

To replace multiple characters in your search, use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard. For example, to search for 'chicken' or 'chickpea':

chick*

Multiple wildcards

Use multiple wildcards in your search. The following query will search find 'chick', 'coconut', or 'chickpea':

c*c*

You can also combine wildcard characters in one search. For example, the search term below will return 'chick' but not 'chickpea':

c*c?

Note: Confluence doesn't support leading wildcards. This means searching for *heese will not return cheese.