What's the best way to go about searching for short names?
A trick that sometimes is useful...


MATCH is usually the fastest way to search
MATCH has some drawbacks
LIKE and RLIKE are very slow
When using both MATCH and LIKE, MATCH is done first, thereby providing very few rows to recheck with LIKE:

WHERE MATCH(...) AGAINST(...)
  AND ... LIKE '%...%'



(I am not familiar with how NGRAM works, so I can't provide specifics there.)

From the 5.7.23 and 8.0.12 Changelogs:  "The ngram full-text search parser permitted comma and period characters to be tokenized as words, which caused an inconsistency between boolean and natural language mode search results. Comma and period characters are no longer tokenized."  (This implies that 5.7.23 has a fix for it.)