Archiving this announcement I made on the MMH front page to keep it accessible to people:
Fliggerty has put a lot of effort into the search algorithms. I would like to take a moment and share a few tips for searching for mods on MMH. MMH has two types of search. It has a general search that you see and use up at the top right of the screen where you just type in your search term(s) and hit that search button right next to the entry box. It also has an advanced search page that you can use by clicking on that second search button (top middle of page).
The advanced search can be very useful for performing targeted (specific) searches. You can limit the search to only look at the title of a mod, the description of a mod, the author of a mod, the file name of a mod, or any combination of those things by using those checkboxes. You can also choose the type of search performed. The default selected will be Match Any (give results that match any of the search terms), but you can also choose to make it do an Exact Match (Note from Fliggerty: "The exact match isn't exactly exact...it is a weighted thing; so towards the end it may not be entirely exact. There is a threshold set". What this means: If you do an author search on Lady Rae and choose Exact Match for the type of search, you will get all of the Lady Rae results at the top of the list and things like Lady E as results further down in the results list.) or a Boolean Search (using the words AND, OR, NOT, or their symbols & | - between your search terms to make the search more specific) using your search terms.
A couple other tips:
You can use wildcards with your search terms (the * symbol). For example, let us say you want to do a title search of all mods that have the word gold as part of the mod title. You could type in *gold* and get results such as mods with Golden, Goldi, SODGOLD, and HendalfGold in their titles instead of just the word gold in the title.
Sometimes it can be useful to perform specific searches using part of a mod name instead of the whole mod name just to see what else you get back as results. For example, instead of searching for Morrowind Patch Project, you could search for Morrowind Patch in a title search and get results such as Unofficial Morrowind Patch v1.6.3b in your search results. Also keep in mind that sometimes it may be beneficial to search on things using the common acronym for a mod as some people release their addons and patches using those acronyms. For example, if you do a title search using MCA you get quite a few results of mods meant to be used with Morrowind Comes Alive.
Additional Note From Fliggerty: "Any search using three letters or less as a lone search term uses a wildcard automatically, and anything with 0 results on the first pass does as well."
Edit: Something I forgot to mention in the past: If your search term would use a hyphen in it, it tends to be better to not use the hyphen and replace it with a blank space instead.