Search returns wrong results
Asked by Mick Davidson:

Hello,

I'm using the page tree search on the Home page of a space. When I search for something that looks like:

* abc_aword

the first three results are all dated Jul 13, 2011. However, the 4th example is Apr 11, 2013 as this is the most recently edited page. The first three results all have titles similar in format to this:

* 716 abc_aword(abc abc)

Given how far in the past the first three results are, AND that the 4th result matches my query more closely (exactly in fact), why isn't the most recently edited page the first result?

Cheers.


Answers:
author: Ramiro Pointis
body: Hi Mick, here it is a documentation where explains how is the ranking of results it's managed:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Ranking+of+Search+Results>

Check it out.

comments: author: Mick Davidson
body: Ramiro,

thanks. I've just been looking at that and it doesn't clarify the problem. Why would pages that haven't been edited in years be more worth looking at than something that was edited more recently? That doesn't make any sense to me, especially given the older results have a different page name?

My search term doesn't include numbers, yet pages with are the first results in the list. Surely pages with numbers in the title would feature further down the list give what I'm searching on?

Cheers.


author: Ramiro Pointis
body: That documentation only explains how it works. You can of course create an issue on Atlassian's Jira to add a new feature or an improvement.

Cheers!


author: Mick Davidson
body: I'm not sure it does explain how it works actually.

For example, why does it use User Profiles and why are they so heavily weighted? Cheers.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: That's Atlassian trying to be more "social". It works for some users of Confluence, but it's awful for others. If you're trying to use it for formal or technical documentation, the last thing you want is weighting on personal profiles and spaces.

There's a rambling set of related requests around improving Confluence search, my usual bookmark is <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-9261> and then I end up wandering along the link trails.

Frankly, everywhere I go, people complain that Confluence search is awful, and I have to agree with them. The two improvements I'd make are to allow Confluence admins to change that weighting table easily (even if re-indexing is needed afterwards), and the ability to weight personal spaces well below the rest, or even ignore them


author: Mick Davidson
body: Nic,

Que? Really, I thought Confluence was an enterprise level wiki, for business use. I'm sure plenty of people use it otherwise, but if your understanding is correct, this is very unhelpful. We should at least have the opportunity to change that. In fact, it'd be handy to be able to chose from a bunch of criteria so that we can decide for ourselves what we need, rather than having what someone else thinks is useful. Thanks for the info and link. Let's get voting. :)


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Sadly, yes. I've been involved in more than one project to point different search engines at Confluence "because the built in search doesn't work".


Tags: result

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