Is there a minimum page title length for Confluence?

[Marco Peters]

Hey all,

We have a page with the title "BE" that is not found when searching on the word "BE". The word 'be' is not a very practival and descriptive title and the author should try to find a better title but we are also wondering what caused the search engine not finding this page.

Is there a minimum title length for pages for the indexing of pages?

Kind regards,

Marco

[Marco Peters · Accepted solution]

I found out that Lucene uses a STOP FILTER. This filter contains a number of words that are not searched for because they tend to be used very often. One of these words is 'be'. This was the reason why our page was not found.

[Davin Studer]

Most search engines throw out common words such as; the, and, an, a, be, is, etc. The returned hit would typically be too large if those common words were included in the search index.

[Marco Peters]

Hello John,

We've made some steps in analysing this problem. It seems there is no problem with having a page title of only two characters. It seems that it is the word 'be'. It is a very common English word and this maybe causes Confluence not generating a search result.

Searching for the word 'is' also results in 0 hits.

We are using Confluence 5.4.

Do you know how Confluence or Lucene deals with very common words that have a very high chance being part of almost every page's content?

Kind regards,

Marco

[JohnA]

Hi Marco,

I don't believe there is a minimum length for page titles to be indexed, although if you are using a version of Confluence earlier than 5.2 then your search will be running on the old Lucene version and that is significantly less reliable than the new version we are now using. I forget exactly which versions of Lucene we upgraded from and to, but I believe it was at least 2 major version, (from v2.x to v4.x), and that has significantly improved Confluence's indexing and search capabilities so upgrading might be something to consider. You can read a bit more about the new and improved search in the v5.2 release notes: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+5.2+Release+Notes#Confluence5.2ReleaseNotes-Fasterandcleanersearch

All the best,
John