spotlight search iOS 9 contacts not showing in results

YES, iOS v9.1 has the spotilght search functioning back to normal for me too!

HOORAY!!!

Worked for me also, though not sure why. Thank you. 🙂

Yep that thing worked for me, contacts vanished post upgrading to 9.1, now they are back after clicking done from group icon.. thanks

Perfect - thank you very much!!!

Try this....Here is what I found. Go to your contacts app and click on groups. Do nothing, just click DONE. That should do it. Good luck. It seems like a re-indexing issue...worked for me

So here's a new one. After none of these tricks worked, I went into contacts and chose to hide all groups. Then I force closed the contacts app, and it started working. I never turned the groups back on. I thought that was weird, so I fired the app back up, and it had turned all my groups back on. I'm wondering if something with the gmail contacts sync is breaking something, or duplicating something with groups behind the ui, and simply turning it off fixes it.

Apple support answer to every problem is to restore. I don't think they get it. In the real world the time to restore, get apps and data back from whatever means you have available, and then waiting for the updates is VERY time consuming.

I have the search issue and apple said ios 9 has bugs in it. great, and how does that help me Apple????

thanks :-) worked like a charm :-)

It worked! Thank you!!

This post is regarding ios 9.2, spotlight search problems. My impression is that the worst spotlight search problem is yet to be discovered: with the new ios 9.2 the number of entries displayed in the found list is limited to ten, which means that if you have more than ten contacts or songs or other items with same search criteria you will access only ten out of the whole list. I've tested it with iphone 5 and 6, and Ipad Air... and discovered that the problem exists in every device working on ios 9.2. Not sure about 9.01 which I rejected right away once experienced its horrible functionality.

The spotlight search is one of the most critical features for ios users. This feature used to be working perfectly fine until about a year ago when it first stopped searching songs. This problem is huge because it may cause limited or no access to users' data. Obviously, the apple "specialists" working on the spotlight search have little idea of what they are doing and there is no reason to expect the issue to ever be rectified. If same "specialists" work on it, a newer spotlight search problem will appear one way or the other. They've consistently demonstrated they are unable to deal with it for over a year which is too much.

If the spotlight search feature can't get back to its normal condition, there is only one way to avoid this huge problem: switch over to a simpler and more reliable system or smartphone. It makes little sense trying to find a solution in vain wasting precious time on discussion forms for years... The spotlight search task is straightforward and should not be any rocket science for specialists.

I couldn't agree more! Apple is trying to be cute and cool and do things that engineers find fun ("let's build intelligent search"). They used to emphasize actual ease of use. The idea that Spotlight won't even find contacts I've marked as "Favorites" when I search for them is absurd.

This is not just true of Spotlight; it's true of Siri, and of pretty much every "just type and it will understand you" system to come along in recent years. My calendar program documentation steadfastly refuses to give formulas for how to specify a date. "Just type it the way you would type it in English." Ok, I do: "have a meeting with client X the last Thursday of every month." Oops. It can't figure that out.

"Smart" computers are exactly NOT that. Dumb search-by-name excels at finding names being searched for. That's all that's needed. Apple, please bring it back!

Yeah man Apple is loosing their way. I was speaking to client support today (at least they have good customer service where I can actually speak with a human) and I told him that Apple should take a couple hundred million dollars on people just reading these forums here so they can report back to the engineers and have common sense solutions.

Apple FINALLY in El Capitan did something kind of right but then messed up Notes...

I can now hold down "cmd" while selecting multiple text...very useful if you want to highlight something that's not all one word after another

Now with my notes that's synced with iCloud on my Mac, it can't search for things that are old. The note exists, I would have to manually search for it.

I wish Apple can just hire me so I can tell them how dumb they are with common sense things.

Like you mentioned the spotlight ***** now and it's the furthest thing from smart. I have 3600+ contacts in my phone. When I'm searching for lets say "Ed" - I don't need John to show up just because somewhere in the notes it says "I met him thru Ed" - I also don't need EDEN to show up as a first result because ED is the first two letters (UNLESS EDEN IS IN MY FAVOURITES)

Man, Apple I don't even want a job, I'm not exactly the best employee since I'm an entrepreneur but I would gladly take a job just so I can be your common sense.

I really want to go back to blackberry but everything apple is so connected to each other (which is good for you as a company to lock someone in) but you have to make sure that all your stuff works. Don't release an IOS on time just because you said you would. I think I speak for 99% of Apple fans and owners that would rather get something late but that works and doesn't make my job harder. You know how many times I almost fell off my bike because it took me forever to find a contact in my phone? What used to take 2 seconds in iOS8 now takes me 10-15? IF IT AINT BROKE, DON'T FIX IT! GAWD!

We've upgraded to iOS 9.1 and the search functions for contacts is still broken. I've tried all the tricks on this thread and have even wiped the phone clean and started fresh and still the same issues. Since that was a waste of time I restored back to my back up and now it's just slow and glitchy.

The only solid search function is using spotlight (even thought i disabled it?!). If I swipe left and search for a contact, it comes up instantaneously.

None of this makes sense to me. I called Apple support who still hasn't followed back up with me, and they told me to restore the device.

Problem still isn't fixed. I have about 10K contacts and in iOS 8-8.4 I never had any issues. Clearly they broke something and have yet to fix it.

So, if so many people are having the same issue, including me, why is it our job to find the solution. Shouldn't Apple just send out a message to all of its subscribers? Wouldn't that make it an easy fix for all instead of US having to try to figure it out?

This worked perfectly!

MY problem was no contacts at all would show up if I started typing in the "search" button. And by doing your quick fix, it's finally working!!!