In Salesforce's Service Cloud one can enable the out of the box search function where the user enters a term and the system searches all parts of the database for a match. I would like to enable smart searching of acronyms so that if I spell an organizations name the search functionality will also search for associated acronyms in the database. For example, if I search type in American Automobile Association, I would also get results that contain both "American Automobile Association" and "AAA".
I imagine such a script would involve declaring that if the term being searched contains one or more spaces or periods, take the first letter of the first word and concatenate it with the letters that follow subsequent spaces or periods.
I have unsuccessfully tried to find scripts for this or articles on enabling this functionality in Salesforce. Any guidance would be appreciated.
Interesting question! I don't think there's a straightforward answer but as it's standard search functionality, not 100% programming related - you might want to cross-post it to salesforce.stackexchange.com
Let's start with searchable fields list: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=search_fields_business_accounts.htm&type=0
In Setup there's standard functionality for Synonyms, quite easy to use. It's not a silver bullet though, applies only to certain objects like Knowledge Base (if you use it). Still - it claims to work on Cases too so if there's "AAA" in Case description it should still be good enough?
You could also check out the trick with marking a text field as indexed and/or external ID and adding there all your variations / acronyms: https://success.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000H6m2 This is more work, to prepare / sanitize your data upfront but it's not a bad idea.
Similar idea would be to use Tags although that could explode in size very quickly. It's ridiculous to create a tag for every single company.
You can do some really smart things in data deduplication rules. Too much to write it all here, check out the trailhead: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/modules/sales_admin_duplicate_management/units/sales_admin_duplicate_management_unit_2 No idea if it impacts search though.
If you suffer from bad address data there are State & Country picklists, no more mess with CA / California / SoCal... https://resources.docs.salesforce.com/204/latest/en-us/sfdc/pdf/state_country_picklists_impl_guide.pdf Might not help with Name problem...
Data.com cleanup might help. Paid service I think, no idea if it affects search too. But if enabling it can bring these common abbreviations into your org - might be better than reinventing the wheel.