BuddyPress search, out of the box, is not very good. Say you’re looking for a group called “History of Wars in America”. The search term Wars in America will return the group, but America Wars will not. (Technical reason: search terms get lumped as a single string into a MySQL LIKE clause.)

I have some ideas about how to improve this behavior in BuddyPress itself, including stealing some of the goodies that recently went into WordPress. But for now, here’s a simple drop-in filter that fixes the word-wise problem.

(if the formatting is messed up, view the original at https://gist.github.com/boonebgorges/8301715)

Something very similar would work for members searches, though the query variables passed along to the filters probably have a slightly different syntax. (I made these changes for City Tech OpenLab, whose members queries are custom anyway.)

Again, this filter is not perfect – it doesn’t try to do any caching, it doesn’t look for literal strings in quotes, etc – but you might find it useful until some real fixes are in place in BP.