Search experience for users

Owned by Johannes Laatu (Deactivated)
Last updated: Sept 17, 2024 by Madzy Soetman
3 min read

When someone uses a search field on your site, the search results depend on:

  • Their Confluence and Jira permissions. Users can only see pages, blogs, requests and request types that they’re allowed to see in Confluence and Jira.

  • View permissions set up in the site structure. Apply view permissions on Refined pages, links, and menu folders in the site structure.

  • Search settings:

    • Promoted search results show at the top of the list of search results. They help users find content quicker by recommending pages to them when they search for specific keywords.

    • If you’ve narrowed down which Confluence pages and blog posts are included in the search results.

  • The type of search field they use. See the table below.

Search field in

Gives search results from

Search field in

Gives search results from

Navigation menu (global search)

  • Pages and blog posts from all Confluence spaces on the site.

  • Issues from all Jira projects on the site.

  • Request types from all JSM projects on the site.

  • Links.

  • Landing pages: the site’s home page, Refined pages, and customizable pages that feature a space or project.

  • Articles from knowledge bases added to JSM projects.

  • Promoted search results, no matter which location they’re set to.

Search Highlight module

Search results differ depending on the page the Search Highlight module is located on.

Summary field when creating a JSM request

If your site features a knowledge base, users who create a JSM request see suggested articles based on their keywords when filling in the summary field.

Left-hand menu of Confluence spaces

The search bar only gives results from the Confluence space it’s located in, including promoted search results. Toggle it on/off in the space settings.

Search result overview

Users have various ways to specify what should be displayed in the search results.

Categories

image-20240314-120829.png

If your site contains a variety of types of content, users can browse the search results by category:

The content is divided over these categories:

  • Pages and news - Ranked in this order:

    • 1. Promoted search results (have a green recommended label)

    • 2. Site home page, Refined Pages, links, and landing pages of spaces and projects

    • 3. Confluence pages and blog posts

    • 3. Articles (if JSM projects on the site have knowledge bases connected to them)

  • Issues - Jira tickets

  • Raise a request - JSM request types

The content is divided over these categories:

  • Pages - Ranked in this order:

    • 1. Refined Pages, links, landing pages of JSM projects, and landing pages of Jira projects.

    • 2. Articles (if JSM projects on the site have knowledge bases connected to them)

  • Issues - Jira tickets

  • Raise a request - JSM request types

When there’s only one category available, the results are shown in a plain list.

The results aren’t divided over categories but shown in a list, ranked in this order:

  1. Promoted search results (have a green recommended label)

  2. Refined Pages

  3. Confluence pages and blog posts

Search location

Users can choose whether to search the entire site or a specific location.

image-20240314-121018.png

Display options

Users can click the icons in the top right corner to choose to how to display the results (content or list view). The list view is more compact and doesn’t show include a text preview.

Content

 

List

 

Image and text

By default, the image and preview text of a search result are taken from the content of the page. You can customize the results by setting a custom featured image and text.