Phone number search often fruitless
Trying to search for a phone number often doesn’t yield results. This is mainly caused by the phone numbers only matching if they compare equal from the back (and additionally by and exact match). I usually don’t type phone numbers starting from the back, though.
With the example number +1-800-867-5309 from search-view.vala, I’d suggest the following examples should produce a match:
- Starting to type a number from the front should match the full number: +18008 should find +1-800-867-5309
- Starting to type a number from the middle should match the full number: 8675 should find +1-800-867-5309
- Bonus: Starting to type a number with a prefix should yield the number without prefix: +1-800-867 should find 867-5309
I think substring matching using the normalized phone numbers, and performing it with and without stripped extensions would give better results. By its nature such a change increases the number of matches, but I think this gives a real usability improvement when searching, while not adding much clutter as this only regards searches with digits.