New Acronym Finder search features!

Happy New Year everyone! We've just rolled out several new and improved search features for Acronym Finder.

Rank
One change you'll see to an acronym search result is a new column called "Rank". Rank is our measure of the relative "commonness", "popularity" or "relevance" of the meaning of an acronym. You'll see that the results are sorted by decreasing rank, which means the most commonly used meanings will be listed first. You can re-sort the list with an alphabetical sort if you like and you'll still be able to see each meaning's rank.

Rank is available in normal acronym searches, and "word in meaning" (reverse lookup) searches.

Categories
Though we've had a good bit of our database categorized for awhile, we didn't have very effective ways of using these categories to filter the results. The table of search results now has tabs at the top showing the categories and how many definitions we have in each category. The default search shows all definitions. Click on the text in a category to show only the definitions from that category using the default rank order, as above.

The ranking of terms also applies within each Category filter. The category tabs also work in both acronym and reverse lookup searches.

Search within these results
In the upper right of the table of results you'll see a link for "Search within these results". Searching within results can be done only if you know one of the words in the meaning. Type in that word (or a portion of the word), and press Enter or the Go button and your results will be based on the acronym you first typed in, but only acronyms with meanings containing the word or word fragment you typed in.

Example: You search for CRM. You get 67 definitions but don't see what you're looking for. You happen to know that the "R" in CRM stands for "Risk". Instead of paging through all the results, looking for your definition, you click "Search within these results" then type in the word "risk" (without the quotes), and press Enter or the Go button. You'll then see only 6 results for CRM, all of which contain the word "Risk".

And we have also provided an even more convenient and direct shortcut for using "Search within result". When you type in CRM for a new search, type in CRM then a space, then a tilde, then the word you know is in the meaning, and you'll get the same result as above. So instead of searching for "CRM" (without the quotes) you'd do a search for "CRM ~risk" (without the quotes) and you would see only meanings for CRM with the word "risk" in them.

Summary
We think these new search features will dramatically improve your ability to quickly find what you're looking for at Acronym Finder. Try a few searches to see how to combine the ranking, category filters, and "search within results" filters.

Please let us know if there are improvements we can make to these search features or if you have any ideas about new features to improve the usefulness of Acronym Finder.