Is there a way to prevent some topics in Confluence from showing up in search results?

[Phil Gochenour]

I have a set of topics at the root level of a space that I use as my "inclusions library." These topics are all preceded with an underscore in the topic name (like _integration note). I want to prevent these from showing up in the search results for that space. I can't restrict viewing on the pages because then they won't display in the topics where they're included. Is there a way to configure search within that space to ignore topics that are preceded by an underscore?

[Sandy Johnson]

I had same problem and solved it by naming the pages with spaces in between every letter so "_integration note" would become "_i n t e g r a t i o n n o t e".

[Alex Yasurek]

I have the same issue as Phil. How did including spaces solve the issue?

[Phil Gochenour]

If a user searches for "integration," then that wouldn't return i n t e g a t i o n because there weren't any spaces in the original search term. While I a clever work around, it would break my current includes when I changed the topic titles, and I would have to go back through and update every use of the include macro. I would prefer something more programmatic, like configuring the space tree to only search children of the home page topic, or to skip over topics that are preceded with an underscore.

[Sandy Johnson]

I did not think of this solution until I had the same issue where users were finding my inclusion pages in their search results. If you change a page name, Confluence will update all links to that page, but as you noted, it will not update any page names within a macro (although I think it should). I chose to use this naming convention going forward with new pages and keep to old ones as they were (there weren't that many). There were a couple that became problematic, so I had to find those include macros and update them manually.