My problem : I have to display all records that have a certain phone number. Basically, I am integrating into a phone app and when a call comes in, I have the phone number and I use that to search Zoho Records to show to the user who is calling. Pretty simple stuff I would think.

However, there are 2 important things here which seem to throw a monkey wrench into this plan.

1) there is a 250 limit on the number of searches I can do per day (per user)

2) in order to search Accounts/Leads/Contacts for a phone number, I have search once for each field/record combination. 

so when a call comes in I have to 

      1) search accounts for main number matching incoming number

      2) search contact for main number matching incoming number

      3) search contact for other number matching incoming number

      4) search contact for mobil number matching incoming number

... etc...

I will quickly run out of searches. 

Add this to the fact that there is no standardized phone number format, but simply a text field, and I would have to separately search for different formats (XXX) xxx-xxxx, xxx-xxx-xxxx, etc. (Yes there are a number of formats the information can be in). The documentation mentions searching using regular expression but apparently you cannot actually use a regular expression. ( I could search for xxx.*xxx.*xxxx if regular expression could be actually used)

So can someone tell me, pretty please, whether I am just missing some important point here? 

I did hear about creating a custom view, but I could not figure out how to do that and I don't believe we should go to our customers and say, "hey, can everyone create a custom view so we can search your records?".

Any ideas?