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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 caseExampleResults
Phrase contains multiple words separated by spaces

"product manager"

  • Results WILL contain “product manager”

  • Results WON’T contain
    just “product” or just “manager”

(tick) Search results with exact match will be returned.

Phrase contains stop words like
and, the, or.

"the admin"

  • Results WILL contain
    “the admin”

  • Results WON’T contain just “admin”

(tick) Search results with exact match will be returned.
Phrase contains the plural version of word(s)

"entire boxes"

  • Results WILL contain
    “entire boxes”

  • Results WON’T contain
    “entire box”, just “entire”, or just “box”

(tick) Search results with exact match will be returned.
Phrase contains special characters like / , & , _

"Dev/Prod"

  • Results WILL contain
    ”Dev/Prod”, ”Dev&Prod”, “Dev_Prod” or “Dev Prod”

  • Results WON’T contain just “Dev”, “Prod”, or “Prod Dev”

(warning) 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-14910 - Getting issue details... STATUS

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.*"



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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"

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")