Concerns on Trigram Table Update and Match Accuracy in WooCommerce

Hello,

I’ve discussed the performance with the head of customer service, who manages over +50 support agents. She wrote back saying, “Hello Max, Yes, I confirm that it’s faster, and the agents also report the same. However, out of about a hundred orders I randomly searched yesterday, let’s say about 20 returned multiple results even though I used a specific number.“

This confirms that the searches are indeed faster, as I had experienced myself. However, this also highlights that the searches can sometimes be imprecise. Therefore, I suggest offering an option within the plugin’s settings that allows users to choose not to use the trigram for certain fields or to select a mode that prioritizes accuracy over performance, like IDs, names, or emails. This strengthens my idea of having a settings page for necessary exclusions, such as excluding IDs from the trigram to ensure precision.

Example on plugin settings page: Checkboxes to exclude certain types like ID, name, email, etc. It is crucial that ID searches remain as precise as they should be. She mentioned that even with a precise ID, it could yield multiple results. I imagine this is because the code searches for partial matches on three characters, even for IDs.

About :

Also, how often would you recommend regenerating the trigram table to ensure it remains up-to-date?

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In the meantime, I noticed that the trigram generation continued. Upon inspecting the code, I found that the task was present because WooCommerce was updated, and the code confirms this as normal behavior. The only strange thing is that the message displaying the percentage remained at 100%, even though everything seemed done (no task). However, this is very minor and now gone.

So, this is a good thing ??

I’ll investigate the 100% notification banner issue.

The plugin maintains the trigram table automatically as new orders come in and orders change. But it’s possible the maintenance falls behind, especially on a busy site.

The banner gets displayed whenever the plugin detects an order id ( === post id) bigger than the largest one indexed.

It should not be necessary to regenerate the trigram table. You do it, if it is needed, by deactivating and reactivating the plugin. Please let me know if it is needed.

Thanks for the defect report and the kind words, Maxime.

This plugin does not cause order search operations to “cast a wider net” than they would without it. (At least, that’s the way it’s designed.) Precisely the same search criteria that WooCommerce uses without this plugin are still applied to all searches. This plugin adds an efficient way of winnowing out irrelevant results before applying WooCommerce’s search criteria.

The order search function is designed, by WooCommerce, to work similarly to Google searches in this respect: it returns items that might match. It’s much more likely to return false positives (items it found that are not needed) than it is to return false negatives (not find items it needs).

The 100% notification banner issue, it seems to persist, but it’s really low priority.

So, on a site with orders every minute like ours, it makes sense.

Normally, our site processes requests quickly, we have the computational power for it, and we have modified the standard behavior to do more at the same time because otherwise, we often fell behind on all tasks and it could lead to huge delays like hours and sometimes a day. We changed that thanks to: https://github.com/woocommerce/action-scheduler-high-volume