3 Tips for Better Confluence Search Results Using Metadata

When you search for a particular page, blog, or attachment on Confluence, do you ever end up with search results that are not relevant to your queries? If so, then you’re not alone.

Confluence search results miss the mark, especially if your Confluence content is extensive. Several questions regarding the search functionality are often found on the Atlassian Community platform.

For example, one user can’t seem to get Confluence to produce accurate results for a specific word search.

If you want certain content to show up at the top when you search for a certain keyword, you might relate to this user who wishes to affect the search results.

Additionally, when an Atlassian Product Manager for Search asked for users’ feedback on how they can improve the search function, an answer elaborating on the need for features like “marking important pages” and “giving user feedback” received the most ‘likes’:

In Confluence, items that appear in the search results have higher scores than others, but what attributes determine the scores in the first place?

According to Confluence Knowledge Base, while all items have the same chance of appearing in the search results, document age, title, content and popularity give each item different weights. Understanding these four factors is an essential first step.

• Document Age

Newer documents score higher than older documents. However, it doesn’t mean that newer documents will appear first; it’s just that there is a difference in their weightage.

• Title

Confluence will look at the number of words in a title (excluding minor words like “the,” “a,” “and,” etc), and will check how many times a keyword appears in the title.

According to Forbes, effective metadata management is the key to better data organization and search. Structured metadata makes it possible for users to find institutional data, whatever that data may be, within an organization’s network.

With a vast Confluence, users may not be aware of what content they can access; let alone where it is located and how to accurately find it. As an admin, you can use Metadata for Confluence to deliver the right results to users’ search queries in three ways:

Improve Categorization of Confluence Content

Information in Confluence can be categorized in a way that facilitates effective search queries, which translates to more accurate search results. How? With predefined metadata fields.

Let’s say your Confluence houses a variety of product pages. With metadata fields like product owners, upcoming releases, and technology populated across the pages, users like your marketing team can quickly find the right product page in the search results when they key in the relevant keyword.

Remove Label Typos

By leveraging the app, you can make global metadata changes to remove typos from a lot of content, quickly and effectively. That way, search queries will lead to more accurate results.

Some additional tips when editing your label metadata:

• Labels are not case sensitive so you don’t have to worry about consistency in capitalization when editing
• Nevertheless, it’s a good practice to have a consistent naming convention for your labels
• You can use underscores or hyphens for multiple-word labels

Add Context to Content

To do this successfully, admins like yourself need to be aware of users’ search intent. Sometimes, they know what data they’re looking for, but they might not use precise keywords when searching. Nevertheless, the right data need to appear in the results.

The best way to tackle this is to structure the data with metadata that are more relevant to users’ search intent. For example, if a page is a “how-to content to use a product,” then the admin can add the metadata fields like software requirement, data center compatibility, and contact person to help with the search results.