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iOS Spotlight Tips: Customizing search results and finding lost apps

December 12, 2013
by Stephen Hackett

I’ve got a lot of stuff on my iPhone:

  • 1,647 songs
  • 4,901 photos
  • 81 applications

Like on the Mac, Spotlight on iOS is a great way to search all sorts of content on your device. And Spotlight is customizable on both platforms.

On iOS, Spotlight’s settings can be found in Settings → General → Spotlight Search.

This screen allows users to re-order the results Spotlight returns by dragging the item types up and down. Unchecking an item type removes it from the results entirely.

Most of what I search for on my iPhone is contact information and applications, so my settings look like this:

iOS spotlight settings

Another great thing about Spotlight on iOS is that it not only searches within app folders, but it will also show you what folder your result is in:

iOS spotlight search results

Very helpful information if there’s an app on your iPhone or iPad that you want to move to a different screen or folder, but you can’t remember where you stashed it.

We have more Quick Tips right here.