How can I improve the text search (summary)

[mom]

Good Morning dear Community,

In our team, issues are named according to the schema Rel_25.01-100_TopicContentThing. Our internal process has been to create release-related items with this naming convention for years.

However, we only switched our ticketing system to Jira a few months ago and found that searching by summary does not work reliably.

In our old ticketing system, it was easy to search for just TopicContentThing, Topic, Content, ContentThing, etc., and all items were always found.

But Jira does not find any issues. We have tried a lot with JQL searches and wildcards (e.g. summary ~ "TopicContentThing*") , but without success.

Can any experienced users give me a hint as to why the search is failing here? Are the special characters the problem? I can't explain it so far. Thank you very much!

I am also willing to introduce new custom fields to split the summary and make it searchable, but I need to know the reason where the problem lies.

Thank you so much!

[Dilip]

Hi @mom 

for exact phrase search you have to use it like this:
summary ~ "\"TopicContentThing\""

if you are getting any error message feel free to share the screenshot

[mom]

Hi Dilip!

thanks for the reply.
With this syntax I don't get any error - but only zero results :)

[ShadowRoots]

Yes, this is a common Jira quirk - here’s what’s happening:

Jira uses Lucene for indexing, splitting text using special characters like `_`, `.`, and `-`. So a summary like `Rel_25.01-100_TopicContentThing` gets broken into unpredictable tokens (e.g. `Rel`, `25`, `01`, `100`, `TopicContentThing`).

That means searches like summary ~ "TopicContentThing*" often fail because:

• Wildcards (`*`) don’t work with the `~` operator.
• Partial matches aren't reliably supported unless the token matches exactly.
• Special characters mess up how Jira sees the string.

Workarounds: 

* Try: 'summary ~ "\"TopicContentThing\""' (quotes help force phrase matching).

* Avoid using wildcards with `~` -- Jira just ignores them.

* Use exact text when possible (e.g. 'summary ~ "TopicContentThing"').

Better approach: Create a custom field (e.g. 'Search Key' or 'Module Name') and populate it with searchable values like 'Topic', 'Content`, or 'ContentThing'. That way you can JQL like:

example:  "Module Name" ~ "Content"

 ...without worrying about Jira's funky tokenisation. :)

[mom]

Hi ShadowRoots,

thank you very much!

even summary ~ "\"TopicContentThing\"" delivers no results.
And I am using the exact phrase as I have it in the summary.

I think.... I really need to split up the summary and feed it to customfields... 

[Bibek Behera]

@mom ,

Welcome to the community. Have you tried the jql with escaping special characters?

summary ~ "Rel_25.01\-100_TopicContentThing"

Similar discussion here :
https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Search-for-an-exact-phrase-with-JQL/ba-p/2131545

-Bibek

[mom]

Hi Bibek - thank you for the quick response.

With this syntax JQL is not happy and tells me:

 '\-100_TopicContentThing' is an illegal JQL escape sequence. The valid escape sequences are \', \", \t, \n, \r, \\, '\ ' and \uXXXX. (line 1, character 31)

I'm afraid I need to learn more about JQL in general.