iOS Spotlight Tips: Customizing search results and finding lost apps

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:

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:

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.

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