Buggy contact search

When I search for a particular contact the contact can’t be found, which forces me to enter the actual phone number in the dialer. After I enter it, the contact appears and now will show up in searches. Needless to say this is a really bad user experience. Any work around or should I just stick with Google for my directly because apple can’t even get the basic functionality right on such an expensive device? If there was a third party dialer I would use it in a heartbeat because there’s so much that just is not good in the Apple dialer.