Exact Match Boost Confluence plug-in

Scope

This Wiki page is the basic user documentation for the Exact Match Boost Confluence plugin. It contains (hopefully) all necessary detail to use the plug-in effectively.

What is it?

The Exact Match Boost plug-in boost exact matches further up in Confluence's search results. You may need this as Confluence's index is build on stemmed words - example: usability, using, use etc. all have the same stemmed basis and therefore get the same score when searching for "usability". Another issue is that Confluence does not really respect exact phrases like "software as a". A page with "software" but not "software as a" might still be among your top search results.

The plug-in does not add or hide any search results.

There is a open issue for Confluence which deals with exact matches: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-14910

The plug-in slightly slows down the search speed. Please refer to the known limitations section.

Compatibility

We tested it for Confluence version 5.8.x and above.

How to get it?

There are two ways of getting the plug-in:

Atlassian Marketplace
In the download section here

Privacy policy

Please refer to the our privacy policy.

Source code license

Please refer to this page.

Configuration

You can configure the following parameters in the Plugin Manager:

Boost factor: the factor by which exact matches are boosted in relation to their original score determined by the Confluence search. A good starting point according to our experience is the factor 6.0. A boosting factor of 1.0 completely disables boosting.
Boost increase: the value by which the boost factor is increased for each additional (starting from 2) exact match.
Scan attachment: if checked the attachment content is also checked for exact matches. This is configurable as it slows down your search a little more.

Please note that it might take up to 20 seconds before the settings become active.

Usage

Just use the search and see how your exact matches are boosted to the front.

Some more details:

In case you search for usability the plug-in boosts all hits in which usability appears in the title or content/body of the search hit (remark: the attachment content is only scanned in case this is activated). Other "similar" words (in Confluence's world) like use, using etc. do not result in a boosting.
In case you search for usability development the plug-in boosts all hits in which either usability or development appears in the title or content/body.
In case you search for "usability development" (please not the quotes) the plug-in boosts all hits in which usability development appears as a phrase.
In case you want to search for a phrase containing a stop word please use single quotes rather than double quotes to get around the known Confluence problem. Example: 'drum and bass'

Trouble-shooting

Known limitations

The following known limitations exist:

Due to unavoidable technical reasons the plug-in slightly slows down the search speed. The impact ranges from almost not noticeable to somewhat noticeable depending on multiple factors: the number of matches in your search, the size of attachments, the current load status of your Confluence instance, the memory capacity etc. To give you an example: in the productive system (approx. 700 users) we have access to the boosting of a search result with 2000 matches delayed the search in average by something in between 400 and 500 ms (boosting of attachment content was turned off).
The excerpt shown in the search results does not necessarily show the exact match (background: the excerpt is chosen by Confluence not this plug-in). This limitation is tracked by this feature request.
The plug-in is only able to boost matches in searches which come via a web request. Internal searches e.g. from other plug-ins might not be boosted.

Getting support

Please use out ticketing system to create a support request regardless wether you found a bug or have a feature request. Existing bugs or feature requests are here.