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Ben Boyter edited this page Apr 29, 2021 · 6 revisions

Welcome to the Better Instant Search for Confluence wiki!

You can find some details on how to get started with Better Instant Search here.

Installing

You can install Better Instant Search by search for "better instant search" in the Atlassian Marketplace. Look for the friendly Koala Image and click "Try it free" or "Buy it now" in the top right. Otherwise visit the following link to get started Better Instant Search for Confluence

After going though the install process you are ready to search!

After Installing

Once Better Instant Search is installed you can access it though the App's dropdown, with the title "Better Search"

Better Instant Search location

It will take minute or two for Better Instant Search to be allowed to index your content from Confluence but once it starts you will be able to start searching. When finished it will re-index every hour to remain in sync with your Confluence install.

Searching

Searching is a matter of typing a single or multiple characters. Better Instant Search will update the results as you type, so you can find what you want in a few keystrokes. You can also search for any part of a word or term in your documents.

You could for instance search for luence to find confluence, or just luen as both would find it correctly.. You can also filter down your search results by time, space or type if you require. Click the filter and the updated results will apply instantly.

Because of way Better Instant Search works you can perform searches that the default Confluence search cannot. For example a search for .168. will match pages which list IP addresses such as 192.168.0.100. This applies across pasted code snippets i++ and such.

This also applies to other languages. So if you for instance mix Chinese and English (or any other languages) your search will still work for either! For example given the following text,

在东南亚部分地区被日本占领期间,日本采取了种族分治和挑拨离间的政策,比如利用马来人担任警察围剿抗日华
而不是“Tiongkok”(中国)来指称华人,刻意制造矛盾和摩擦。

A Confluence search for Tiong would not normally find anything. However Better Instant Search has no problem with this and returns the result as you would expect.

Example usage

The little number at the end of each title is the score of the document. You can ignore this for the most part but can be useful to see how relevant a document is to your search.

Exact Match

You can perform case insensitive exact match by wrapping your terms in ". An example of this would be "better search" which would match exactly.

Regular Expressions

You can perform RE2 type regular expressions against your content. This can be useful when performing security scans against your content. To perform a regular expression search wrap it in / characters. For example

/[cb]at/

Will search for both cat or bat in your content.

To test your regular expressions the following site is very helpful regex101 and be sure to select FLAVOR -> Golang to get the RE2 engine.

An example regular expression that looks for AWS AKIA keys is /AKIA[a-z0-9A-Z]{16}/

Regular Expression Search

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