Using Global Search - Entities with large names

I am wondering how other people deal with naming customers.  We deal with lots of large companies that have long names and/or they are divisions or affiliated with other companies or have several dbas.  We also have a lot of customers who say their company name different depending on who is calling (Universities and Military are good examples - they use the dept name or an acronym, etc).  We have tried to make these searchable in global search by putting the alternate spellings and names in (parens) on the name/id field.  This makes that field messy, and the field itself