Confluence Search Syntax

This page describes the special words and punctuation marks you can use to refine your search.

Matched phrase search

Use double quotes to search for content that contains the phrase 'cheese one', or a phrase where 'cheese' and 'one' are the major words:

"cheese one"

Note: Confluence will ignore common words (stop words), including 'and', 'the', 'or', and more, even if they are included within double quotes. See the default list of stop words used by Confluence's search engine, Lucene, in the Lucene documentation.

For example:

Searching for "cheese one" returns only pages in which 'one' appears as the first word (other than stop words) after 'cheese'. So it will return 'cheese for one' or 'cheese to one' or 'cheese one'. It does not return 'one cheese' or 'cheese flamingo one'.
Searching for "the one" returns all pages containing 'one' because 'the' is a stop word.

If you would like to override Lucene's tokenisation and stemming, please cast your vote on this improvement request: CONF-14910.

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

On this page:

Related pages:

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

Excluded term search

To search for content that contains 'chalk' and 'butter' but not 'cheese':

chalk butter -cheese

Grouping search

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

Title search

To search for content with 'chalk' in its title, where title is the field keyword.

title:chalk

Wildcard searches

Single character

To search for 'butter' or 'batter' you can use a question mark as a wildcard:

b?tter

To search for 'chicken' or 'chickpea' you can use an asterisk as a wildcard:

chick*

You can use wildcards anywhere within a word, even at the very beginning:

*chick

Multiple characters

To search for 'chick' or 'chickpea':

c*c*

You can also combine search characters to get the exact word. For example the search term below will return 'chick' but not 'chickpea':

c*c?

Proximity searches

Use a tilde character followed by a number, to find two words within a certain number of words of each other.

For example, the following search will return 'Octagon blog post':

"octagon post"~1

The following search is not valid:

"octagon post"~0

Range search

Use the operator 'TO', in capital letters, to search for names that fall alphabetically within a specified range:

[adam TO ben]

Note: You cannot use the AND keyword inside this statement.

Fuzzy search

Use a tilde character to find words spelled similarly.

To search for octagon, if unsure about spelling:

octogan~

Combined search

You can also combine various search terms together:

o?tag* AND past~ AND ("blog" AND "post")

Searching for macros

You can search Confluence content for anywhere a macro is used. To do this, just add macroName: to your search and append the macro name after the column. For example, search for all excerpt-include macros:

macroName:excerpt-include*

For more information about macroName and other search fields, see Confluence Search Fields.

Searching for labels

Use the 'labelText:' prefix to search specifically for content that has a specific label. The table below gives examples of search terms that you can enter into Confluence's search box, and the search results that you can expect.

Searching for ...	Returns content that ...
`recipe labelText:chocolate`	contains the word '`recipe`' or has the label '`chocolate`'
`recipe AND labelText:chocolate`	contains the word '`recipe`' and has the label '`chocolate`'
`labelText:cake OR labelText:chocolate`	has the label '`cake`' or the label '`chocolate`'
`labelText:cake AND labelText:chocolate`	has both labels '`cake`' and '`chocolate`'

The 'labelText:' prefix is an example of a search field. See more about Confluence Search Fields.

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