Confluence Search Syntax

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

Excluded term search

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

chalk butter -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

Title search

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

title:chalk

Date range search

To search for content created or modified within a certain date range, using the created or modified keywords. The date stamps are in numeric 'yyyymmdd' format:

created:[20000101 TO 20131231]
modified:[20000101 TO 20131231]

Wildcard searches

You can use one or more wildcard characters in your search and place them anywhere in the search string, except at the very beginning. So, you could search for http*.atlassian.*, but you can't search for *.atlassian.* or ?ttps://confluence.atlassian.*, as they begin with a wildcard.

Wildcards can either replace a single character in your search, or multiple characters.

Single character

To replace a single character in your search, use a question mark (?) as a wildcard, For example, to search for 'butter', 'bitter', 'better', or 'batter'. 

b?tter

Multiple characters

To replace multiple characters in your search, use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard. For example, to search for 'chicken' or 'chickpea':

chick*

Multiple wildcards

Use multiple wildcards in your search. The following query will search find 'chick', 'coconut', or 'chickpea':

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?

Note: Confluence doesn't support leading wildcards. This means searching for *heese will not return cheese. 

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', but not 'Octagon team blog post':

"octagon post"~1

The following search isn't valid, because you can't search for two words within zero words of each other. If you think the words are next to each other, use the matched phrase search.

"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 can't use the AND keyword inside this statement.

Fuzzy search

Use a tilde (~) character to find words spelled similarly.

If you want to search for octagon, but you're not sure how it's been spelt, type the word followed by a tilde:

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 to find where a macro is used. Start your search string with macroName: and type the macro name after the colon. For example, to 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

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