Search
Confluence search is the company-wide punchline — weak relevance, stale results, and you need the exact words to find anything.
What people actually say
✕Confluence admins say they routinely receive complaints about search and have to tell colleagues to use precise words or exact strings because the engine can't handle partial matches.
Source: Atlassian Community — Confluence search complaints ↗✕There's a long-standing open request (CONFCLOUD-36770) asking Atlassian to deliver Google-style search in Confluence Cloud because the built-in search is so hard to live with.
Source: Atlassian Community — CONFCLOUD-36770 Google-style search ↗✕Editing complex documents containing many diagrams and tables is slow, and that slowness compounds across a large space — by the time you find the page, it has already loaded twice.
Source: Capterra — Confluence reviews ↗
Postgres full-text search with tsvector, trigram indexes and a tuned BM25 ranker so partial words and typos still surface the right page. Permissions resolve as a single join, not a cascade, so search stays sub-second on a million pages — and 'find anything in our wiki' goes from a meme back to a feature.