This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
Today we will take a look at the settings on you iOS device for Spotlight. Spotlight is Apple’s search system to allow you to look up any information from the content stored on your iOS device.
Some of you may also be familiar with Spotlight for the Mac. Spotlight on your iOS device is not that much different. Fewer features but very handy when you are trying to locate that one file you need.
Simply go to Settings > General > Spotlight Search on your device. You will be presented with the following window:
This list showcases all the areas in which spotlight for iOS devices will search upon a search entry being typed in.
By default all areas are active and the order in which they appear above will be the order in which your search results will be presented. However, but clicking on the ticks you can deselect some options to further refine your searches. Doing so will look like this:
As you can see from above the music and notes options have been deselected therefore upon doing a search your device will ignore these areas and not reveal any content in the search results.
At anytime you can reverse these settings by simply clicking an option and the tick will reappear.
A user can also change the order in which search results are presented. All you need to do is click and drag on the right hand side where you see the three stacked lines. Upon dragging to your desired order the change as it is happening will look like this:
Once this is done your search results will now show Mail first as shown in this example from above.
Now you know how to customize Spotlight Search for iOS give it ago by swiping your homepage on your iOS device to the right.