Ask HN: Why is Confluence Wiki Search so bad?

My company uses Coveo [www.coveo.com] for their intranet. They have a native connector for Confluence, it works MUCH better: https://docs.coveo.com/en/1716/index-content/install-the-cov...

On a confluence that covers the whole of the Fortune 500 company I work for, I do NOT want to search over the corpus of all the documents hosted on it. I want a persistent search filter where I can easily restrict my results within certain parameters without having to constantly re-filter my results.

I think most search engine designers want to make the index as broad as possible, but the problem seems to be that people rarely want such broad searches. What they really want are very detailed indices and metadata implications over well trodden folders.

I used to work at Atlassian but NOT on Confluence and I have no special information about this. But I can tell you that internally it is well known how awful the search is - they run one of the biggest known instances of Confluence - and there have been many spikes and projects to improve it. I have spoken to lots of people and asked why it continues to be so bad but all I get is handy-waving about how it's such a hard problem.

Honestly I wish I knew more but it was like pulling teeth trying to get people there to speak openly about why it's so hard when it is solved in so many other products.

On one level that's great and I'm certainly glad you made it work.

On another level, and bearing in mind that Confluence is a paid product, this absolutely should not be necessary and competent search is something that Atlassian should provide out of the box.

(Yes, I have beef with Confluence, but in my case it's primarily due to the historically awful editing experience.)

Because "enterprise" tools are bought by people who don't have to use them, so improvements that actually matter to users are not a priority.