What PSA stands for other than prostate specific antigen. And how that can complicate searching

I suspect we've all had the experience at one time or another of going online to search for some aspect of "prostate specific antigen," and, to save time (or so we thought), we searched

psa

rather than

prostate specific antigen

But searching the letters p,s, and a, together will produce a bunch of hits, most of which produce "false drops," that is, hits that satisfy the search query of p,s, and a together, but have nothing to do with the terms "prostate," and "specific" and "antigen."

So why mention this? Because it serves as a reminder that when doing even a simple websearch with even just a few letters, such as p, s and a, the vast holdings of the web will result in a search display that will then have to be painstakingly weeded through, to identify those "p, s and a," results that are actually relevant.

So it would probably be better just to type out and search

prostate specific antigen

in the first place.

But as for all those false drops involving p, s, and a together, what are some of the other things they can stand for, and which get retrieved, and subsequently need to be weeded out and ignored by us, when we see them in our search results?

Well, I did a google search

what does psa stand for

which led me to the site

https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/psa

which lists two hundred and fifty eight entities on the web that go by the initials "psa."

Everything from businesses, such as

Photographic Society of America
Professional Services Automation
Public Service Association (New Zealand)
Pharmaceutical Society of Australia
Poetry Society of America
Professional Squash Association

to diseases, such as

Psoriatic Arthritis
Pseudoaneurysm

as well as to things, such as

Pressure Sensitive Adhesive
Polar Surface Area
Protein Sequence Analysis

and let us not forget groups, such as

Parrot Society of Australia

and

Pot Smokers of America

all of which could potentially show up as irrelevant hits in the searches we do for prostate specific antigen issues, if we are using just "psa" as our search term.

And that 258 figure mentioned above is just for starters. There may well be a lot more, as vast as the resources of the web are.

So maybe there really is a false economy in typing the shorter

psa

when what we really mean is

prostate specific antigen

Of course It could be pointed out that it's possible to qualify searches, such as typing after "psa" things like

NOT professional

But to simplify matters, maybe we should really just type

prostate specific antigen

and get what we're looking for right away.

That would seem to be the easiest, most effective course of action.

Prostate specific anxiety.

And then there's also the media's own "Public Service Announcement."