iOS 9 Spotlight Search not working properly

I have no Facebook syncs and no groups and it still isn't working

That worked for me... thanks

Spotlight isn't working across ANY of my iOS devices. I've tried all the suggestions here. I wonder if the problem isn't somehow related to iCloud, since the same issue is appearing on my iPad, my iPad mini, and my iPhone, all running the latest iOS version (9.2.1). I noticed problems with Spotlight months ago that seemed to be related to alternate Keyboard apps (text input wouldn't activate the search bar) but the problems persisted after I removed all keyboards except the standard and rebooted. What happens is this: After a reboot, hard or soft, Spotlight works fine (either with or without Contacts selected in the Settings) but after a few minutes of use, it stops working. A downward swipe reveals the search bar but typing text in it and clicking search does nothing-- no results appear, and the usual Search the Web etc options also don't appear. Performing the various "fixes" offered in this chain has no permanent effect. Rebooting is the only (temporary) solution.

Is Apple aware of this issue? I'm obviously not the only person experiencing problems with Spotlight.

@GerryConway - I'm experiencing the exact same issue since iOS 9.3 Beta 2 and now am on iOS 9.3 Beta 4 (I have an iPhone 6). Apple has not yet come up with a fix to my knowledge and I have not found a solution yet. Let me know if you find something.

My phone has been unable to find anything using Spotlight search for a few months now and have tried all the above solutions. Most recently, I wiped the phone and restored it from backup, which did temporarily fix the issue, but the problem returned a couple of days after restoring. At this point, I feel like the only remaining solution is to wipe the phone and start over.

Any help here would be much appreciated.

Running iOS 9.21 on an iPhone 6

Thanks!

Just updated to 9.3.

Problem still there... arggg..

This is a bug in 9.0 through 9.3. There's no fix.

Workarounds:

1. Launch with Siri. That works.

2. Quit background Apps. Yeah, that thing Schiller says not to do and semi-experts claim isn't needed. My bad actor is Reeder.app; I always have to quit it. Occasionally I have to quit a few apps, I'm starting to kill them routinely. I think it's a timing bug triggered by RAM consumption so it may not affect the 6s. (more RAM)

Interestingly, quitting a few background apps allowed Spotlight to successfully search for one item and then it fails again. I quit all apps, searched again, and it still didn't work. Rebooted, still nothing. It is interesting that it briefly worked, which seems to lend credence to your theory that the issue is memory related.

That said, Siri is able to launch apps, which never occurred to me and for that, I'm grateful. Thanks for posting.

Yes, Siri always works. What phone are you using?

siri does not work when spotlight search does not work

turn off contact and turn on contacts in spotlight search

reboot

then it will work once or twice.

I use US English.

happening on iPhone 5S and iPad Air with IOS 9.x

Is nobody from Apple looking at this? Very hard to find things without the search.

AT&T iPhone 6 with 64Gb of storage.

The other thing that has worked for me is resetting the device to factory settings and adding apps back in one by one to see if I could ascertain the culprit. After taking the time to do this, I never was able to figure out if a certain app was causing the difficulty but I have hundreds of apps (maybe another issue), so this wasn't really a viable solution for me. Also, the data associated with those apps isn't easily recovered unless I restore from backup (which also restores the bug). I've been attacking the issue from the other side by slowly deleting unused apps, but that hasn't worked thus far.

I have weighed Spotlight not working or losing a tremendous amount of data (iMessages go away completely and don't repopulate, for example) and I've decided my data was more important than search. Not the best trade off :-/

In my case, Siri does work even though Spotlight doesn't. It seems that there are many varieties of this bug.

Yes, in another thread we came to same conclusion. Many bugs and/or ill-behaved applications means fixes vary. For at least one person I trust a full wipe and restore was a longterm fix. Others claim changing language for US to UK English and back again did the trick (rebuilds indices). For me Siri always works and killing Reeder.app almost always restores search.

Any restart will fix the problem for me transiently, even when Reeder.app is in use, but Spotlight gets slower over time then stops returning results.

And Wrapper's Siri never worked..

PS. There's an active discussion on this bug here: Re: Spotlight Search shows no results.

I think it's worse with 9.3, so maybe we'll get more info. I doubt it's fixed before iOS 10. Siri and background app quit are my only workarounds.