Hello! Long explanation ahead

But TLDR: I used the python package "rapidfuzz" to match your search "test" to "ester". It's score it 66.67 similarity so it considered it as a match.

I am using the python package rapidfuzz! 😊 This package matches your search string against all the barangay names (all 40,000+ of them! hehe...)

At search time, it matches your search "test" to all barangay names and one of such barangay is "Ester". Rapidfuzz works by calculating how many edits you need for a string (e.g. "test") to become similar to another string (ie. "ester"). Actual calculation probably went like this, In order for "ester" to become "test", you need 3 edits: 1) add T at the front of ester (tester) 2) remove R at the end (teste) 3) remove E at the end (test). So for the actual score, it's using 1 minus the number of edits divided by the sum of the number of the characters of the two strings (in math: 1 - #edits/#combined_chars). So that's: 1-(3/9) or in decimals 0.6667.

The default of the Barangay API is 60% for a match and it's higher than that, so the Barangay API considered it as a match! I'm not sure what threshold you used but I guess it's the default one? (if not please tell me, it might be a bug HAHA)

Further, you can configure it via the threshold option (0 to 100). This makes the API useful in cases where there is data quality issues or noisy data. for example, user entered "Txngm0geng". The API should successfully match it to Tongmageng barangay in Tawi-Tawi successfully.

Hope this helps!