Confluence uses the Apache Lucene search engine library . Lucene performs tokenization and stemming. For information about the effects, refer to the Confluence issue Provide ability to override Lucene tokenisation and stemming and search for exact text .

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
• https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf613/confluence-search-syntax-964961055.html
• https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf613/confluence-search-fields-964961056.html