Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

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I haven't used Confluence Question, but I use Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket every day, and search is also the limiting factor of all of those product.

Jira search is useless, you have to use filters and memory of dates to get a set of issues small enough for you to search manually.

The search in Confluence can best be summed up as "Here's a PDF". For some weird reason Confluence can search PDF sort of okay. It's typically not what you want, but because Confluence can search PDFs better than normal Confluence pages, PDFs are what you get in 75% of your searches.

Atlassians continued failure to deliver a half decent search feature in any of their products is fascinating. I honestly don't mind their products, they're fine for our needs, except you can't depend on search.

Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but I do not work on Jira/Conf/Bitbucket & all words here are my own opinions.

A major problem is that many deployments of Atlassian products are Server deployments (i.e. not Cloud), which means there's basically the embedded Lucene engine and that's it; anything else starts hurting either performance or deployment options at scale. And most Server customers have a much greater interest in scaling (while keeping servers performant & easy to run) than getting tweaks to search algorithms - in particular many customers refuse to upgrade unless there is a major bug fix or performance boost they're going to get.

On the Cloud side, for better or worse the focus has mostly been on letting people find their work, not find new content they haven't seen before. For example, Confluence's My Work tab (or similar - I forget the exact name), or the search in the cross-product https://start.atlassian.com/ are both useful for getting back to things you've seen before. Hopefully some day we'll finally make some headway on the "I don't know what I'm looking for but I know how to describe my problem" use case.

And just to buck the trend, search works as advertised in the Atlassian product I work on, statuspage.io ;) (but then our search use case is straightforward and rare enough to just use elasticsearch with some minor tweaking).

Search on Bitbucket is similarly broken for any cases more exotic than an exact word match. So in practice, it's useless for source code.

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