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Get the high-level details you need to set up your Confluence Cloud site in order to meet your team's needs.
Confluence search syntax
This page describes the special words and punctuation marks you can use in the search field of the advanced search to refine your results.
The following types of search are available:
Search for exact matches
Surround the phrase you are searching for in double quotes to look for an exact phrase.
Use case | Example | Results |
|---|---|---|
Phrase contains multiple words separated by spaces | "product manager"
| Search results with exact match will be returned. |
Phrase contains stop words like | "the admin"
| Search results with exact match will be returned. |
Phrase contains the plural version of word(s) | "entire boxes"
| Search results with exact match will be returned. |
Phrase contains special characters like / , & , _ | "Dev/Prod"
| Ignoring the special character, search results with the exact match will be returned. |
If you'd like search results to match an exact phrase including special characters, cast your vote on this improvement request: CONFCLOUD-69222
Search for keywords using operators
When you don’t know the exact phrase that leads to the content you want, you can enter keywords and operators in the search field.
OR search
To search for content that contains one of the terms, 'chalk' or 'cheese', use the operator OR in capital letters:
chalk OR cheese
AND search
To search for content that contains both the terms 'chalk' and 'cheese', use the operator AND in capital letters:
chalk AND cheese
NOT search
To search for content that contains 'chalk' but NOT 'cheese', use the operator NOT in capital letters:
chalk NOT cheese
Group search terms
To search for content that must contain 'chalk' but can contain either 'cheese' or 'butter', use brackets to group the search terms:
(cheese OR butter) AND chalk
Search for keywords using wildcards
Inserting wildcard characters is an easy way to format your keyword to replace single characters or multiple characters in the results.
To perform a single character wildcard search, use the ? symbol.
To perform a multiple character wildcard search, use the * symbol.
Keywords or phrases containing wildcard characters need to be enclosed in quotation marks. "cha?k and che*"
Example
To return https://www.atlassian.com/ or http://www.atlassian.jp/, search for:
"http*.atlassian.*"
Leading wildcards
Confluence doesn't allow wildcards at the beginning of your search. For example, you can't search for "*hum*" or "?hum*", as they begin with a wildcard.
Single character
Use a question mark ? as a wildcard to replace a single character in your search.
Example
To return 'butter', 'bitter', 'better', or 'batter', search for:
b?tter
Searching using special characters does not work if surrounded by double quotation marks.
Multiple characters
Use an asterisk * as a wildcard to replace multiple characters in your search.
Example
To return ‘chicken' or 'chickpea’, search for:
"chick*"
Multiple wildcards
Use multiple wildcards in your search to replace single and multiple characters.
Example
To return 'chick', 'coconut', or 'chickpea', search for:
"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?"
Combined search
You can also combine wildcards and various search terms:
o?tag* AND past~ AND ("blog" AND "post")
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