Set the number of simultaneous search requests

Confluence admins can set the maximum number of simultaneous searches users can perform using the search panel. By default, the maximum is set to 40. This limit applies to a single Confluence node. If you're running Confluence Data Center with multiple nodes, this number will increase.

If your Confluence server serves a large number of individuals who use this feature regularly, some of whom are being denied access to it, you may wish to increase this value.

To change the maximum number of simultaneous search requests in Confluence:

1. Select Administration menu , then select General Configuration
2. In the left-hand panel, select Further Configuration.
3. Select Edit.
4. In the field beside Max Simultaneous Requests, enter the appropriate number.
5. Select Save.

Disable quick search options

The search panel feature offers a quick way for users to search and filter content in Confluence. We recommend keeping this feature enabled, unless it's causing significant performance issues on your site.

If you disable the quick search option:

• The search panel will no longer appear when users select the search field. When you enter a search query, we'll take you to the advanced search page.
• The Confluence QuickNav Gadget will no longer drop down a list of search results. When you enter a search query, we'll take you to the advanced search page.

Other search macros, including the Livesearch Macro and the Page Tree Search Macro, won't be affected if you disable the quick search option.

To disable quick search options from your Confluence site:

1. Select Administration menu , then select General Configuration
2. In the left-hand panel, select Further Configuration.
3. Select Edit.
4. Deselect the Quick Search checkbox.
5. Select Save.

Enable the exact search

With the exact search feature, Confluence returns more precise matches by ignoring wrapping punctuation and capitalization of the indexed text. You can expect more predictable and precise results when searching across various content types in Confluence.

The steps to enable the exact search depend on the search engine and indexing languages that you use:

• exact search with OpenSearch
• exact search with Lucene

Exact search with OpenSearch

Starting with Confluence 9.5, exact search is enabled by default for most languages. 

Nuances with Chinese, Custom Japanese, and CJK indexing languages

Exact search doesn’t work well with languages that don’t use whitespaces between words because Confluence splits up tokens by breaking on whitespaces.

Chinese and Japanese seldom use whitespace between their characters, and therefore, doing a search in quotes rarely returns results, unless you’re searching for an entire sentence or looking for a small selection of characters that are isolated from the rest of them.

This is why exact search is disabled by default for Chinese, Custom Japanese, and CJK indexing languages.

You can still enable exact search by adding the feature flag, which will allow exact token indexing for those languages. This flag is primarily for Korean instances bundled with Chinese and Japanese in the CJK option, as exact search would benefit the Korean instances but not the Chinese and Japanese instances. 

If you have instances with Chinese, Custom Japanese, and CJK indexing languages, do the following:

1. Enable exact search via the confluence.open.search.improvements.exact.scriptio.continua.enable dark feature.
2. After enabling the dark feature, rebuild the search index.

Exact search with Lucene

The exact search is disabled by default for Lucene. To enable exact search:

1. Enable the following dark feature confluence.search.improvements.exact. 
2. After enabling the dark feature, rebuild the search index.

Note that this change may impact the size of your instance's index and the time taken for indexing. The outcome will depend heavily on the size and shape of the data in your instance, especially for larger instances nearing a 30-gigabyte index on disk, exceeding the recommended guardrail.

If you want to enable this feature together with an extensive index size (30 gigabytes or more) and have concerns about potential increases in index size or reindexing time, consider implementing OpenSearch, along with this change. We recommend testing these changes in a staging environment first before rolling them out in production.