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Confluence search sometimes returns results that surprise users. These tips are from support people who have helped users to understand search results.

Searching with quotes, for example searching for the string "Book One", does not look for an exact match like most search engines do. Rather, it looks for "Book AND One" and would return all matches where "One" is the first word after "Book" other than things considered to be stop words (a, the, an, etc.) This is explained somewhat in this support request: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-7148^{Image Removed}

It's not possible for Confluence search to return hits for "the best," as an example--with or without quotes, "the" is ignored.

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uses the Apache Lucene search engine library

Searching for a string surrounded by quotes produces results with an exact match except for strings with stop words such as "the." Stop words are ignored.

As part of its tokenization process, Lucene strips out punctuation from the search string, although Confluence search now preserves  _ (underline) characters. Refer to the Confluence issue Allow search for words and phrases with non-letter symbols: plus (+), minus (-), period (.), dollar sign ($), asterisk (*), etc

For detailed information about Confluence search refer to the following pages provided by Atlassian:

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf613/search-964961041.html

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• https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf613/confluence-search-syntax-964961055.html

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• https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf613/confluence-search-fields-964961056.html

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