Why do we see these search peculiarities?

[Sune Mølgaard]

For a client, we are investigating some strange search behaviour in Confluence.

Searching for the Space "IT & Software", that Space does not show up when writing "IT & ..." - actually, it doesn't show up until the whole title is completely written. It does show up, however, writing the full word "Software".

Along the same lines, searching for the Space "Legislation & Standards" only shows it upon writing the whole word "Legislation" or the whole word "Standards".

Is the latter case expected behaviour? I.e. whole words only?

As for the first example, why doesn't "IT", by itself not show the relevant Space?

Surely, the following is not supposed to be expected behaviour, is it?

Best regards,

Sune Mølgaard
Translucent ApS

[Jeff Turner · Accepted solution]

Have you reindexed Confluence recently?

What version of Confluence are you using?

[Sune Mølgaard]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for asking.

Problem was present in 6.15.7, where we tried reindexing both by just clicking, and by removing the index folder and clicking.

We are now at 7.1.0 and have tried the same things, again to no avail.

Best regards,

Sune Mølgaard
Translucent APS

[Jeff Turner]

I see the same behaviour searching for 'IT & Software' in Confluence 7.1.0. It seems the search stemmer is throwing away the '&'.

Confluence is using a pretty old version of Lucene and search-related feature requests, like https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-14910 are 10+ years old, so I think that's just the way it is.

[Sune Mølgaard]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for confirming and clarifying - I shall proceed to accept your answer :-)

Best regards,

Sune Mølgaard
Translucent ApS

[Paul Stallworth]

It looks like the releases for Confluence 7 are still running Lucene-4.4.0 but there is a request to upgrade to 7.5.0.  Maybe since Jira 8 got a Lucene upgrade it will be easier to get it into Confluence 7.