The discussion revolves around the limitation of the category search feature. NomNuggetNom pointed out that searching for a parent category does not include its sub-forums in the results. codinghorror agrees that this could be improved, suggesting that the search should also match category descriptions.
The conversation then shifts to a related topic of searching for users. codinghorror mentions that the global search feature should match on multiple criteria, including full names and usernames. Mittineague and TechnoBear discuss an issue where searching for a username can bring up results with matching email addresses, due to an import issue from vBulletin where email addresses were set as “Real Names”. Mittineague clarifies that this issue only affects imported members. cpradio suggests that allowing users to change their “Real Names” could solve this problem.
A bit of a mouthful here. Easiest way to see what I mean is to repro:
I would expect that the sub-categories of “support” also appear when I search. If this is behaving as intended please move the topic.
It is as designed but I agree this could be better. It should also match the description of the category too. I am pretty sure name search only works on username and not full name there which is also not great. Lots of non-topic/non-post search stuff could be improved.
Just not a huge priority as the vast majority of the time you are not searching for users or categories..
If / when that gets fixed, could you please have it not match email addresses.
One of our Staff noticed it and she doesn’t mind that much AFAIK.
But some members might not like it.
Oh my bad I was referring to global search at the upper right.
Same basic logic though, you want search to match on a few different things. Data and metadata, full name and username, category and description, etc.
No idea how you are getting email out of this, why would either the new topic category search, or the global upper right search, search on emails??
Maybe searching for a user by email? But I feel we are getting off topic 
. I’m not looking for an overhaul of searching here 
I think @Mittineague may be referring to the fact that when our vBulletin members were imported, the first part of their e-mail address was set as their “Real Name”. (I’ve no idea why.) So searching for David, for example, will bring up usernames in the results, plus anybody with david in their e-mail address.
Yes. I had thought it was all members, but I’ve since done some testing and it appears that only those members that were imported are those that potentially have this problem.
So more an Import or Real Name issue than a Search issue.
Which is easy to solve if we could simply change our “real names” (anytime – with the exception of if SSO is enabled)