That doesn't explain why Atlassian can't build a working search function for Confluence.

I get the feeling the biggest problem with site-local search engines is a tacit requirement that the search index always must be up to date. That severely hamstrings any search engine, since there's a wealth of supplemental information to be gathered by considering the corpus as a whole that is simply not available if you support real-time updates.

Generally not a fan of Atlassian, but I can't say Confluence search has been a problem, I have more problems searching within Google Workspace (if its still called that this week).

I'm not particularly impressed by it.

It's made worse by the fact that it's usually the only way of navigating confluence, as any non-trivial confluence eventually turns into a nightmare maze of abandoned stale pages, dead links and half-baked attempts at restructuring it where the person enthusiastically pushing for the restructuring effort sort of gave up a third through because it turned out to be a lot more work than it seemed.

I've seen this time and time again in both big and small organizations that use confluence. Makes me feel there is a fundamental design problem with the product.