Using the google apis client library "gapi" and trying to search for users by email. I found the gapi.client.people.people.connections.list method, but it doesn't seem to accept a query or searching capability.
So is my option to just get all contacts and sort/query them on the client?
You are correct there is no way to do a search on the contract list method. You will need to download all of the users contacts and search them locally.