The search trigger across Canvas should work with just two characters and not require three. Some names (like Xi) only have two characters, and this would make the people search more efficient if just two characters were required to activate the search trigger. A two-character trigger would also help when searching courses, whether the term designator has two characters or of the course names include the instructor's name.
Edward Elliott 
ps. it also seems that entering a space and then the two character last name provides a trigger for results to show.
But now this has me wanting to see the results by sortable name with last name first. (I know, picky, picky).
Actually, 2-character words are very common in Chinese and Japanese. For example, the Chinese version for the phrase "Convolutional Neural Network" is "卷积神经网络", which can be separated into 3 words of 2 characters each, "卷积", "神经" and "网络". Also, most Chinese people's family names contain only one character, and their given names contain at most 2 characters. Now I'm wondering where is the source code to modify for the open source version of Canvas.
I'll wager a coral reef in the South China Sea that changing the code to search for just two characters will result in unsatisfactory results. My hunch is the database will have less than optimal performance and the results page will be clouded with false hits, depending on the number of users. So I don't think I could argue we would attain a positive return on investment for the hours spent.
But if the People search interface were to have a 'Starts with' condition option instead of only defaulting to 'contains'....
Or simply begin the search with a space and then the first two characters of the last name.
Some course names could contain only 2 characters, too, for example, "英语" (English) and "数学" (Mathematics).
This issue was just sent to me and my suggestion was to search for the instructors first name and the two character last name. (Made up example: Abe Lo ). This makes me ponder how many people have two names that contain just two characters each.
I also wonder why three characters had been selected. Perhaps there would be too many variations with just the two characters? For example, when I search for just 'erne', which is part of my last name without the beginning and last letter, I receive results that contain that part of my name. Now if I search for 'ern', as expected the results expand greatly. Now I need to search through the search results.