Advanced search in Google Contacts

Question

Is there any way to do perform advanced searches in Google Contacts?

For example, wild card operators, AND operator, OR operator etc?

I want to search anywhere in a name, not just the beginning of a name.
(i.e if I write 'ac' it should display Jack as well)

Answer 1

No. Google currently does not have that feature.

Only search prefix is allowed. The Google help page says,

• You can use prefixes.
• You can search by a person's first and/or last name.
• You'll see matching results as you type
• You can search for contacts by phone number, or notes you've entered about them.
• You can search by domain or username. For example, searching for 'gmail.com' will return all contacts with a Gmail address.

Answer 2

YES ... but, not using Google Contacts itself. On my computer, I have Google Contacts sync'd with MS Outlook, which can do a thorough search of the data in my contacts. I also use Lookeen, which can find the data in my contacts.

On my phone, I just found out that there are 3rd party apps that will do a thorough search of my Google Contacts.

It is irritating that Google, home of infinite data mining, doesn't provide a way for us to search for the data in Google contacts. I think their Search box formerly did that, but now is strangely limited.

Answer 3

On a PC, use Export to export all contacts to a .csv file. Then use Excel (or equivalent) to search, using the Excel "Find" facility.

Answer 4

Contacts searching in Google is still abysmal. I have 3000 contacts, with detailed information in each...

If I try to search the information using Google Contacts, if I try say searching for "Opera House", it will show up all 100 people listed as 'Operations Director'. This is ridiculous and completely unusable for someone with the level of detail in notes that I have, or the amount of contacts I have.

The best alternative I've found is this cumbersome process:

1. Use your PC, to EXPORT a CSV file in Google Format - [Google format is required because if you try to export using the standard format, then when importing into a spreadsheet it often separates the notes into new rows, which makes reading the info much harder]
2. IMPORT the data into Google Sheets.
3. If necessary, select the first and last row, then right click and resize all rows to 21 in length, then you can scan down and read the contents easily.
4. Freeze the first column (so that any searches immediately display the name).
5. Use the normal search functionality within Google Sheets to search using standard operators, and enable quotes to be used in searching too. So I can search now for "Opera House" and it will quickly show the names of the people who have that phrase in the notes (regardless of whether the notes are 5000 words long).

Answer 5

I found that exporting, both Google CSV or Outlook CSV, did not work: output files came out randomly broken or with few records or few data, totally useless

The solution was to print the whole database, in my case more than 3,000 records, and perform a search in the resulting PDF file, which contained: NAMES, TELEPHONE NUMBERS, INTERNET LINKS, EMAILS, NOTES, ADDRESSES, etc, but not LABELS