Spotlight is one of the most powerful things that Apple has both on its Mac and iDevice line-up. You can search everything right from Spotlight: contacts, texts, emails, apps, notes, reminders, videos, music.. it’s a somewhat endless list.
Anyway, the thing is, you can configure Spotlight search on your iPhone/iPad to your taste. Now, if you constantly find yourself searching for content from mail, you might want mail-related results to come right on top of Spotlight search. The same goes for apps, videos and music etc.
By default, Spotlight search shows you contacts first and then lists the apps and then so on and so forth. You can configure the sequence of the search result categories by changing them from within Spotlight’s settings. Here’s how to do that:
- Open Settings
- Go to General
- Tap on Spotlight Search
- Tap on the slider-control (three lines on right) and hold to move the labels.
- You can also, optionally, uncheck the labels that you don’t want to be in Spotlight search. This means they won’t be searched when you enter the keywords in Spotlight.
- That’s it. Once done, press the home button and get to Spotlight to test it out.
In most cases, you’ll want to have:
- Applications
- Contacts
- Reminders/Notes
- Calendar
- Messages (if you use iMessage a lot, this is a must-have)
- Music
As can be seen it’s easy to configure the Spotlight to fit your needs. You don’t want contacts to show up at all in the Spotlight search? Done. Want apps to show up before anything else? Done.
Got any other Spotlight tip that can make things simpler and easier on the iPhone/iPad? Share with us in the comments!
