I didn't understand why Confluence's search engine works so poorly before I built my own search engine, and I especially don't understand why it works so poorly after. It's an absolute mystery and goes far beyond misconfiguration. Feels like they're just using a binary index and completely the skipping relevance ranking.

Which is the height of bullshit since Confluence uses Lucene internally, which obviously does support stemming (at least it didn't. Luckily, I haven't had to use Confluence for ages). Confluence search is what happens when some dev gets told "hey, add search, we need to mark a checkbox", searches for 30s for "Java search lib" and just adds Lucene without knowing anything about it.

JIRA gets a lot of bad press but it works ok. Confluence is an utter PoS with nothing going for it, nothing working the way it should or the way a random user would expect them to work.

How it survives (thrives) on the marketplace is a mystery.