Confluence Search Sucks. Here Are 3 Things You Can Do to Improve It Using Unleash

IDC research shows data professionals spend 37% of their week searching for information. People waste a lot of time searching, for information, and often to no avail. You would assume that Confluence's centralized wiki would have superior search capabilities, given that the company promotes its partnerships with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slack. The reality is that Confluence search sucks.

Confluence or Confusion?

Confluence’s search capability is limited. Your enterprise search tool should allow your employees to discover information from one or more databases in a single query. You deserve better when navigating and searching your Confluence documentation wiki. Essential info may be scattered throughout other platforms (Google Docs, Drive, etc.), often causing confusion.

✶ Supercharge your productivity by integrating Asana and Confluence

Confluence Search Is Limited and Isn’t Intuitive

Confluence is a web-based workspace for wiki-based communication, collaboration, and documentation. While it works well as collaborative software, many users wish it had more navigation, syntax, and general search capabilities.

One of the most voiced concerns by Confluence users is that it is not intuitive. The interface is not user-friendly, making navigation difficult. Using a tool like Confluence should be straightforward, like a guide taking you through the jungle on a path. This isn’t the case here.

Confluence has a lot of search capabilities that are “hidden” from the main navigation menu. In order to access them, you have to know where to look in order to create a shortcut.



You should not have to create a workaround to access your documents or implement a search. Search should be as easy as setting parameters, using filters, narrowing down your search, and finding the exact document you need.



For new users, it has a steep learning curve. And using hacks to make Confluence work for you may introduce further time-consuming issues down the road. One of the most valuable commodities is time, and searching for meeting notes, product requirements, or project plans should not be where you invest it. Let's look at the list of advantages and disadvantages of Confluence:

Advantages of Confluence

• Searchability: Allows users to index search pages and attachment formats.
• Generic filters: Different filters like; time modified, space, article, type, and label are available.
• Categorization of material: Users can categorize their material using "labels".

Disadvantages of Confluence

• Lacks metadata: Confluence relies heavily on metadata and there isn't a lot of it available.
• Inability to sort function: Identifying and sorting the correct pages with no metadata is almost impossible.
• Labels with no meaning: Managing data with just labels and no metadata is cumbersome.
• Large organizations are more complicated: They use more than just basic Microsoft Office-based attachments.
• Impossible search for organizations: With larger amounts of data, searching for attachments and refining results isn't easy.

If a large organization lacks a standard policy and streamlined search capabilities, it will run the risk of producing duplicate documentation and pages. These restrictions are simply too troublesome. Here are three things that you can do to save the precious time you waste on searching for stuff.

Improve Confluence Search With Unleash

Learning how to navigate your documents and wiki should be as simple as following an easy pathway. Using an enterprise search tool will help your employees find what they need across Confluence and other tools. Using a third-party integration like Unleash allows you to create a central hub to bypass Confluence's clunky navigational interfaces.

The Unleash Menu is divided into three sections to simplify your life and help you get the information you need quickly: Explore, Views, and Apps. When you click on a specific app, the search box will provide results related to that app or account. Within the related applications, you can see the many resources that are accessible for that app and account. It will allow you to find the documents you need with ease.

✶ Need to see it for yourself? Explore the Unleash features at your fingertips

Confluence is wonderful for searching as long as you know the exact location of your files and documents. That's a major problem as your documentation wiki grows; no one has time to remember these kinds of finer details — which is why document configuration matters.

Someone in the organization who is not on the technical team may not think about documentation the same way. A well-structured configuration management process guarantees that documentation for objects like requirements, design, test, and acceptance is correct and compatible with the system objects' real physical and logical structure.

It is important to create a standard process for all teams that need access to documents using consistent file name formats and location pathways. Unleash offers instant, advanced, and contextual search capabilities to refine the overall search.

Full-text search allows you to search pages, documents, and files to find precisely what you need. Unleash can find the data you're looking for in any format and from any Confluence location, including databases, document management systems, e-mail servers, and paper.

✶ Can organizing files result in chaos? Discover why leveraging advanced search tools are better

The best way to streamline is to customize your search by creating filters. Custom filters allow you to refine your search with ease and create a better user experience.

Discover what you're looking for and reduce the need for numerous search queries to narrow and modify your search results. Filter docs created by a specific account – ;Drive → ;File → ;Created by → Select account

You can create advanced filters for document types, labels, reported by, shared by, modified by, and other filter types specific to your needs. Your search parameters do not change when you utilize filters.

✶ Will searching give the answer? Discover why search is often the missing element in a knowledge base

Power Your Confluence Search to Work for You

Search is quickly becoming one of the most important technologies in our daily workflow; using tools rather than hacks allows you to spend your time where you need it most. Unleash is the ideal central hub connecting documents and indexes and analyzing all of your relevant organization data to provide actionable information at your fingertips.

Integrate some of the most extensively used applications to get more work done with less clutter. Unleash allows you to locate exactly what you're searching for with a single search and obtain relevant ranked results in a flash. Download Unleash today to experience the Unleash difference.

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