How to use the iPhone's Global Search: Spotlight

A very useful feature of the iPhone is its global search function Spotlight. The excerpt below from iPhone: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition gives some pointers on how to use it effectively.

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Man, you will love this one.

The iPhone has a feature so fast, powerful, and useful, you’ll wonder how the heck anyone survived without it: a global search feature called Spotlight. Just by typing a few letters, you can search almost the entire phone at once—or even the whole Web. Here’s where it looks to find matches:

• Contacts.
  First names, last names, and company names.
  
  
• Mail.
  The To, From, and Subject lines of all accounts. (The iPhone doesn’t try to search the text inside your email.)
  
  
• Calendar.
  Appointment names, meeting invitees, and locations (but not any notes attached to your appointments).
  
  
• iPod.
  Song, performer, and album names, plus the names of podcasts, videos, and audiobooks.
  
  
• Notes.
  The actual text of your notes.
  
  
• Mail.
  The header information (name, subject) of your email messages
  
  
• Messages.
  Yep, you can search your SMS text messages in iOS 4, too.
  
  
• Your apps.
  For frequent downloaders, this may be the juiciest function of all: Spotlight also searches the names of every single app on your iPhone. If you have dozens or hundreds installed, this is a much more efficient way to find one than trying to page through all the Home screens, eyeballing the icons as you go.
  
  
• Search Web.
  At the bottom of the list of search results, the Search Web button appears. Tap it to open Safari and begin an automatic search for the term you’ve typed, using Google or whatever search page you’ve specified in Settings.
  
  
• Search Wikipedia.
  At the very bottom of the list of search results, you get a Search Wikipedia option. As you could probably guess, tapping it opens up Wikipedia and performs a search for the term you’ve typed.
  
  These last two options are new in iOS 4. They might not quite seem to fit into the same categories as Mail, Apps, and so on. But once you get used to the idea that you’ve got quick Web search options right there in Spotlight, they can save you a few steps the next time you want to look something up online.

Tip: It’s worth noting that the Contacts, Mail, Calendar, iPod, and Notes programs have their own Search boxes (usually hidden until you scroll all the way to the top of their lists). Those individual Search functions are great when you’re already in the program where you want to search. The Spotlight difference is that it searches all these apps at once.

How to Open Spotlight

The Spotlight screen is built into your Home screens at the far left.

Once you’ve pressed the Home button, you can either keep swiping your finger to the right, or press the Home button again (and maybe a third time), until the Spotlight screen heaves into view.

(Truth is, that’s an overly wordy description of what’s usually a simple task. A slow double-press is usually all it takes.)

Tip: If you have an iPhone 3G, you can designate the double-quick-press Home-button shortcut to mean “Open Spotlight.”

How to Search

The keyboard opens automatically (below, left). Begin typing to identify what you want to find and open. For example, if you were trying to find a file called Pokémon Fantasy League, typing just pok or leag would probably suffice. (Spotlight doesn’t find text in the middles of words, though; it searches from the beginnings of words.)

A results list immediately appears below the search box, listing everything Spotlight can find containing what you’ve typed so far. (This is a live, interactive search; that is, Spotlight modifies the menu of search results as you type.)

They’re neatly grouped by category; the beginning of each category is marked with an icon, and the light gray and medium gray backgrounds alternate to help you notice when a new category has begun.

Tip: If you drag your finger to scroll the list, the keyboard helpfully vanishes so you can see more of the list.


If you see the icon of whatever you were hoping to dig up, just tap it to open it. The corresponding program (Contacts, Mail, iPod, the app you tapped, whatever) opens automatically.

How to Tweak Spotlight

You’ve just read about how Spotlight works fresh out of the box. But you can tailor its behavior to fit it to the kinds of things you look up most often. To open Spotlight’s settings, start on the Home screen. Tap Settings→General→Spotlight Search.

You can tweak Spotlight in two ways here:

• Turn off categories.
  The checkmarks identify the kinds of things that Spotlight tracks. If you find that Spotlight uses up precious screen space listing categories you don’t use much, then tap to turn off their checkmarks. Now more of Spotlight’s space-constrained screen is allotted to icon types you do care about.
  
  
• Prioritize the categories.
  This screen also lets you change the order of the category results; using the little grip strip at the right side, you can drag an individual list item up or down.

For example, the factory setting is for Contacts to appear first in the menu. But Contacts has its own search box, so it might make more sense to put Calendar or Applications at the top of the list so that it’s quicker to do a schedule check or fire up a certain app. You’ll have less scrolling to do once the results menu appears.