While your Confluence installation is growing with content, it will become more difficult to find the information you are looking for using normal navigation. By now, you must have noticed the search box at the navigation bar of Confluence. This box is referred to as the quick search, or quick navigation aid, and that is the feature we are going to cover next.
The quick navigation aid feature automatically offers you a drop-down list of pages, attachments, and user profiles, matched to the title of your search query. This list changes while you are typing your query. You can select one of the suggestions to directly browse to that item.
To use the quick navigation aid, perform the following steps:
- Click on the Search box or use the keyboard shortcut /.
- Start typing your query. Confluence will give you suggestions based on the title and your query.
- Use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to navigate through the suggestions.
- Press Enter to open the selected item.
- If you don't find the item you are looking for, use the Search for link at the bottom to do a full site search. More about full searches will be discussed in the next section.
There are some things to know about the quick navigation aid:
- Confluence will truncate any titles that are too long to be displayed.
- Items are grouped by their content type. Confluence shows a maximum of six pages / blog posts, two attachments, three people, and two spaces. This way you can easily find the type you want.
- Items are ordered based on most recent updates.
- The matching part of the title is displayed in bold.
- A Confluence administrator can disable the quick navigation aid in the Confluence Administration Console.
A full search is a search in all contents in all spaces, global and personal, user profiles and attachments. Confluence will index the contents of your attachments too; the full search will therefore also search within your attachment's content.
To do a full search, perform the following steps:
- Use the quick search to type in your query.
- Press the Enter key. This means you will ignore any suggestions.
- The search screen appears with the results, if any.
- Click on an item's title to open the item.
Each item will be represented by its title, a few lines of matching content, the containing space name, or the date the content was last updated. For attachments, there will be the size and a download link.
On the right-hand side of the screen, there are more options to filter your research; this is explained further on.
When you perform a full search, Confluence may offer you an alternative spelling of your search query. This alternative spelling will appear next to the words Did you mean. Click on the link to accept the suggestion. Some of the key features offered with this functionality are as follows:
- Confluence uses a bundled dictionary and words gathered from your own content. This means Confluence can make suggestions for your own jargon that may not appear in a standard dictionary.
- Confluence will favor words that appear more often in your content before words from the dictionary.
- Confluence may offer suggestions with incorrect spellings. This happens when the incorrect spelling occurs many times within your content. This is intentionally as the purpose of the "Did you mean" feature is to help find your content, not to correct your spelling.
- A Confluence administrator has to turn on the "Did you mean" index in the Administration Console.
The search screen, as shown on the previous page, appears when you do your first search. By default, Confluence will search all content in all spaces and attachments. You can filter this using the filter options on the right side of the screen.
Using the filter options, you can filter results based on the following categories:
- Where: This restricts your results to a particular space or a group of spaces (favorites, personal, or global)
- What: This restricts your results to a particular content type (pages, blog posts, comments, and so on)
- When: This restricts your results to the content modified within a given period of time (today, yesterday, last week, and so on)
- Who: This restricts your results to the content last modified by a particular user
Don't forget to click on the Filter button after specifying your filter. If you use more than one filter, Confluence will filter based on all those filters. Use the Clear Filter link to remove all filters and return the full result set.
You can also use the full search to search for labels. Use the labelText: prefix to search-specify for content with the specified label. The following are some examples how to use this prefix:
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Searching for… |
Returns content that… |
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Contains the word "ipsum" or has the label "lorem" |
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Contains the word "ipsum" and has the label "lorem" |
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Has the label "ipsum" or the label "lorem" |
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Has both labels "ipsum" and "lorem" |
The labelText: prefix is an example of using search fields. Using search fields is a really powerful and advanced way of using the Apache Lucene search engine used in Confluence.
There are more search fields available that can be used to find content in Confluence. They are as follows:
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Search field |
Description |
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You can search for content located in the space with the specified For example, | |
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You can search for content created by the user with the specified username. For example, | |
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You can search for content where the last modifier is the user with the specified username. For example, | |
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You can search for content where the given macro is used. For example, | |
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You can search for attachments with the specified filename. For example, | |
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You can search for content that is created within the range specified. The format is For example, |
More information on search fields is available online at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Search+Field.
Confluence has a search syntax that will help you further refine your search queries. This search syntax is explained as follows:
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Syntax |
Example |
Description |
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You can search for content that contains one of the terms. Note that |
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You can search for content that contains both terms. Note that |
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In this example, you can search for content that contains |
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This is similar to the |
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In this example, the search must contain |
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In this example, you can search for content with |
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In this example, you can search for |
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In this example, you can search for content with words starting with |
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In this example, you can search for | |
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The two words specified must be within a certain number of words of each other. |
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This searches for words that fall alphabetically within the specified range. Note that you can't use |
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This searches for words spelled similarly. It is useful when you are not sure about the spelling. In this example, |
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This searches for content where the macro "Panel" is being used. |
Confluence will ignore common words such as "and" or "the". This is based on the default list of stop words used by Lucene.