Apparatuses (including user equipment (UE) and modem chips for UE), systems, and methods for reducing false alarms (FAs) and miss-detections (MDs) in cell search results are described. In one method, the minimum of a value for the accumulated metric for a first short code and a value for the accumulated metric for a second short code is used as a pruning metric for each candidate cell. One or more thresholds are applied to the pruning metric to determine whether the candidate cell will be pruned from the final candidate cell list.