cannot search messages after upgrading to iOS8!!!

Tried this as well before and did it again; it starts indexing and works for a few minutes and then it stops working again.

UPDATE: All of a sudden it stopped working. Why Apple, why?!

YES, this works! I too have been trying all kinds of methods to solve this issue. This procedure described by joelruby above fixed it. The key is to toggle the spotlight search on and off while still in the foregin language as well as performing a search or two, and give it a little time. After switching back to english again give it a little time but your searches in messages should start working. There may be merit in first trying to search from the home screen rather than the messages app. This solved my issue on an iPhone 6, iPhone 5s, and an iPad mini retina all running iOS 8.0.2.

Mine started working again. Let's see how long it lasts this time.

Thanks joelrubi! You're a genius! It worked on mine. I hope it lasts long! 🙂 Thanks to ahaglund for the additional instructions too!

Thanks!

Your suggestion worked for me.

Followed it to the letter!

just a quick note, changing the language to CHINESE and back does not solve the problem. So I'm not sure if all languages are the same. Changing to spanish and back did solve the problem.

Same vs me. Switching languages to Polish, Russian, English, Spanish gave no effect. Still no way to search in text and iMessages 😟

iPhone 5, iOS 8.02

Thank's a lot Joelrubi!

It worked like a charm for me too.

Like mohanp said: "Followed it to the letter!"

Ohh... and yeah... i did it AFTER updating to ios8.0.2.

Ok, here's my story, hopefully it'll help those of you who are still having problems with this.

When I upgraded to iOS7 last year on my iPhone 5, I had the same problem. This distressed me greatly, because I manage apartment buildings, and I keep track of tenants contact info in my text messages; as long as I use their name somewhere in a text, I can search it to find their phone number, or if I miss a call from a tenant, I can search for the phone number in my messages, and see any texts we exchanged so I can identify who it was. So, when I can't search messages, it makes it a real pain.

I finally found that if I did an iCloud backup, erased the iPhone, and restored from the backup, the message searching worked again. Problem solved.

Now, with 8.0, now on my iPhone 5s, the same thing happened. I said "crap", but I knew what to do - I backed up to iCloud, erased the phone, restored from the backup, and boom, message searching worked.

For a while. Then it stopped. AARGH! I did it again. Same thing - worked for a while (like half a day) then stopped. That's when I tuned into this message thread. I tried switching languages. No luck. I updated to 8.0.2. No dice. Tried switching languages again. No cigar. Then I did the backup-delete-restore again, and finally, it started working, and it has stayed working for a couple days now. Whew!

I never tried switching languages multiple times and waiting and all that rigor that was posted more recently, but it certainly seems that 8.0.2 was the difference in at least getting the backup-delete-restore method to work, so if you're having trouble still, try that.

I'm having the same issue and have tried the language switching, iMessage on/off, and installing the 8.0.2 update. The search would work temporarily a couple times, but it then stops after a bit.

After trying the Language "solution" about 20 times, with every different version of it.....nothing worked. Then I went in to the keyboard, turned of Emoji and Spanish (I never turned Spanish on to my knowledge, so I am guessing that it added to my keyboards when I switched language. Search works like a charm in both the "Messages" search bar and the "Spotlight Search"

Settings> General> Keyboard> Keyboards> English> QWERTY (I already had on QWERTY and never actually went to it, but just letting you know what mine is set on)

Just curious - I was wondering if anyone in this thread doesn't have emoji installed.

I experienced some weirdness today with message search failing a few days after a clean restore from an iCloud backup. Deleted the emoji keyboard, switched to Spanish, and found out that the Spanish and SwiftKey keyboards I installed could search messages, but the english keyboard could not (crazy eh?). I proceeded to delete the Spanish keyboard and switched back to English. Now my search works again, but who knows until when? 😟

This worked for me! Thank you!

Tried all the solutions: changing language, iMessages on and off, etc.

The only procedure that worked perfectly was Joelrubi's one.

Thanks a lot!