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 Proximity Searching Question

Proximity Searching Question

Jonathan Zschau Feb 28, 2019

Hello:

We are having trouble using proximity search syntax. It seems to be returning overly-broad
results and behaving more like an OR operator, in that low proximity distance searches are
getting hits even though the words co-occur farther apart than the word distance we specify.

For example:

comment ~ '"solar footing"~5'

The terms 'solar' and 'footing' occur just once in the issue within a comment and are 15 words
apart. Adjusting the proximity distance even down to 1 still results in the issue being found
by the search, even though the terms do not occur that closely. We would expect to see:

comment ~ '"solar footing"~5' --- returns zero hits.

comment ~ '"solar footing"~20' --- returns one hit.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

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Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Mar 12, 2019

I believe that you are seeing a change to the way that proximity searches work in Jira Cloud
now. Please see the details in Search syntax for text fields: Term searches - Jira Core Cloud
Documentation

Unsupported term searches:

 A single character search ( ? ) will automatically convert to a wildcard search (

* ) at the end of the term.
 Operators for fuzzy search ( ~ ), proximity search, and term boosting ( ^ ) no
longer have an affect on searches. When these operators are present in a
search, they will be ignored.

The documentation has been updated recently to indicate that the use of proximity searches in
Jira Cloud is now unsupported. Which would explain the behavior you have reported here.
Sorry there does not appear to be a way to make this work in Jira Cloud natively today.
Perhaps there is a plugin in marketplace that might be able to help provide some kind of
similar search functionality in Cloud.

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