iOS 9 Spotlight Search not working properly

I have been in the same situation for the last month (no Spotlight search results for anything at all) and had had no joy after trying all sorts of combinations of previous suggestions such as the hard hard, restoring from backup, changing language, turning all spotlight search settings off and on again, some of these multiple times.

Today I had a live chat with Apple Support who suggested I do a Reset All Settings ( Settings > General > Reset). I was initially reluctant but did a quick bit of research and it doesn't destroy all settings, so went ahead and did it. This immediately fixed the search issue.

So if you're still stuck I'd highly recommend this. For reference here are the settings that I had to update after doing this, and it wasn't a terrible chore to go through this (and indeed I found a few to tweak while I was at it)

• General
  • Siri (off)
  • Spotlight Suggestions (all are on)
  • Accessibility
  • Restrictions
  • iTunes Wifi Sync
• Wi-Fi

  (unless saved to iCloud via Keychain)

• Notifications

  Permissions need to be regranted or removed e.g. if you don’t like things appearing on lock screen.

• Do No Disturb,
• Sounds,
• Display & Brightness
• Wallpaper
• TouchID and Passcode
  • Fingers
  • Passcode
  • Access when locked (Today, Notifications, Siri, Reply, Wallet are all allowed)
• Privacy

  Locations services (off)

• Wallet & Apple Pay (unless saved via iCloud)
• Mail, Contacts, Calendards

  Account setttings preserved but settings such as “Events Found in Mail” had reset to default (on)

Many settings -- such as iCloud and those specific to third party apps -- were fine after the reset.

Please followup in 3-4 days and let us know if it stays fixed. (I've fixed mine many times for up to 1-2 days.)

Still working Andrew?

Interestingly do "Reset All Settings" is reputed to be the only way to remove Messages from Spotlight search (you can hide them from results, but I think they still get indexed), which apparently can show DELETED SMS messages. I remember a bug with iOS and some SMS text that could crash phone. [1]

The message bug is apparently a cache clearing issue -- which is a perennial iOS problem (esp. iCloud video caching). A full wipe/restore should also clear caches though, and it may be less painful than Reset All Settings.

So it is plausible that some versions of the iOS Spotlight fail are due to indexing deleted but cached SMS text that breaks Spotlight. In that case both a wipe/restore and a "Resets All Settings" should help. I think this particular bug would most likely apply when Spotlight stops working and never returns. In my case it works for a while, fails, and returns if I kill selected background apps (reeder.app always, with 9.3 sometimes others).

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/26/ios-bug-crashing-iphones-with-text-message/

Hi,

Yes all still working properly 3 days later. Search seems a lot better now than I ever remember it (faster, more sources of results) so I wonder if the Spotlight index had been degrading for some time.

Bear in mind I'd done a backup/restore before also, so that may be needed as part of the full solution.

Andrew

Good to hear, I may try then.

Incidentally, language switching works for some people. Last time I did it I switched from US English to French and back. Now my phone is showing a mix of French and English -- UI is English but spelling corrections are French! I suspect caching issues; iOS has needed a cache cleaner since version 5 or so. May have to do a wipe/restore to fix it.

I'm inclined to believe this might be a low RAM issue with 1GB devices like my iPhone 6. Really it's astonishing how much they try to index/search against/lookup with that spotlight search database.

I've tried all the ideas in this thread other than reset all settings, and it appears to help alleviate the problem but seems to keep coming back.

I think there are multiple causes of spotlight failure Brian, but the one you and I have feels like a timing issue. Performance degrades over time until some process takes so long to complete that the screen renders without results. That smells like RAM-exhaustion with 1GB device. RAM exhaustion will be worse if one uses apps that hold onto RAM -- I wonder about Reeder.app in that respect. It also explains why force-quitting can help.

I suspect the problem gets worse as the number of apps grows (even those that can't be indexed) and as index volume grows (esp. contacts, calendars, pinner is huge, etc).

I have a bit of a hunch that excluding items from Spotlight slows down screen response. There's no way disabling spotlight in settings changes what's indexed, it's too quick to enable and get results. I would not be surprised if there's some bad code (maybe a bad API) so that checking for an exclusion slows execution; in a worst coding/API scenario every exclusion might trigger rebuilding the results --- and I had about 100 exclusions. For the heck of it I turned everything on (which is one of the side-effects of reset all settings). Maybe a bit faster.

Anyway I don't think there's anything you and I can do besides using fewer apps. We just have to see if iOS 10 fixes the problem. Happily I think 9.3 has made things worse, so maybe there will be more complaints. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't get a fix before 10.1. I think only a small % of users are impacted.

jfaughnan wrote:

I have a bit of a hunch that excluding items from Spotlight slows down screen response.

I have that same hunch! I removed a few things from Spotlight that I didn't want (App Store for starters) and after that it started getting flakey: no search results for some searches (though interestingly if tried same search again a bit later it had results, suggesting that there's a delay in generating the result set rather than no results.

After adding everything (and it had to be everything) back into Spotlight search it has, touch wood, been behaving.

I continue to have improved results with every spotlight item enabled. Instead of failing every time Reeder.app is running it fails maybe 30% of the time.

I think our version of Spotlight results failing in 9.x is a Spotlight display asynchronous thread timing bug with 1GB devices that have a very large number of apps installed some of which claim (and perhaps do not properly release) significant amounts of RAM. It maybe a bit worse with 9.3 because this release uses even more RAM than 9.2.x.

I think the main reason 'Reset All Settings' helps is that it turns Settings:Spotlight Search:SEARCH RESULTS to all on. Changing those settings doesn't alter what's indexed, it's only altered what is displayed. There is an issue with the code such that filtering unwanted results from display slows display enough to push past the asynchronous thread bug. There may be an API issue such that the display set is rebuilt every time a setting is found to be off. (That would seem to be horrible coding, but maybe there's an architectural issue so that the dev had no choice.)

We just have to wait and hope this is better in iOS 10.x. I would be quite surprised if Apple fixed it in iOS 9.x.

Incidentally, this Apple Discussion thread has a database corruption issue.

The "Link to this Post" item for my last post, Re: iOS 9 Spotlight Search not working properly, instead of referencing the post goes to the top of 'page 5'. There's no UI indication Page 6 exists, but if you click on the '5' you get the missing thread parts.

So we should probably continue future discussion/findings in a new thread.

Apple has recently updated their Discussions code, I hope this isn't a common problem. It's first I've seen it.

I got bored last night and did a Reset All Settings on my phone and whoa boy that took a long time to get back up and running. Ran into issues re-activating iMessage, FaceTime and Wi-Fi calling, had to re-launch the vast majority of my apps to try to get them to re-prompt for permissions (Notifications, Location, Heathkit, etc.) because--incredibly--there's no way to do that from the Settings app until the app itself requests the permission. Relatedly, I had to uninstall and reinstall a handful of apps that (probably not anticipating this issue) gave no way to re-prompt for permissions (Purify, Yahoo News, couple others). On several other apps, simply launching the app was no enough to re-prompt for permissions, so I had to turn off notifications in-app, then turn back on to get the prompt.

And to top it all off, Spotlight Search is literally exactly the same as it was before--not as responsive as it once was and only returns results 2/3 of the time it's used.

That's why I haven't tried Reset all.

Thanks fo reporting!

If you kill apps and repeat search can you get spotlight to work?

Worked like a charm! Thank you!!!

I am new to this forum, but I have had the "blank" Spotlight Search issue ever since some version of iOS 9.. Now my iPhone 6 works fine.

I have force terminated some suspicious apps, especially those that have text input fields such as Mail, Flixster, and Safari.

I have also enabled SEARCH RESULTS for all apps listed. That seems to have helped.

I am wondering if this is a problem with the Spotlight Search servers at Apple. As you type characters, they seem to be sent up to the server one at a time so that search results can appear as you type. If the server gets hung up, then it seems that could cause the problem we are all seeing. Perhaps Apple has recently and quietly fixed the problem at that end, because I haven't had the problem for about a week now.

Any thoughts?

The solution in iOS 9 appears to be to go to Settings -> General -> Language and change the language. It seems to force spotlight to re-update. You can then change it back to your preferred language after.