Spotlight doesn't search my contacts in iOS 9

Everyone

submit you complaints here

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

I am experiencing the same thing on my iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 9.0.2. ALSO, Spotlight Search will not find iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) file nor folder names.

This is indeed a very weird bug. Without any changes in phone settings during the last 3 days, the wrong behavior of spotlight search appeared and disappeared over the day.

In the morning spotlight search was not showing contacts, over the day it showed contacts, now again it is not showing contacts. Very strange.

The only changes that I could think of are the addition of new contacts and updating of some contacts by the means of sync with the Gmail account. I'm just guessing, but I think that after contacts are synced and changes are found, spotlight search reindexes the contacts. Having over 2400 contacts, reindexing might take a while to very long time. I now believe that during reindex the spotlight search simply skip searching in contacts. With fewer contacts and fewer changes inside contacts, reindex is probably fast and the user doesn't have the chance to see the bug in action. That might be an explanation of why not every iOS 9 user have this problem.

Considering the above situation, please post the number of contacts that you have (a round figure) so maybe we can find the pattern for the bug.

1500 ish contacts.

Applying the the same theory to calendars...I have 4 calendars with several years of events.

2000 contacts roughly. However Contacts does not show in search results as a separate section on my phone, no matter what. Occasionally top hits will show contacts, but there is no distinct Contact section of the search results. This is true even in the morning, when I haven't edited for a long time and have left the phone charging on wifi, and now when I am on LTE and have just edited a contact. iCloud and Google both.

I can make it appear by resetting everything and only turning on contacts, but even this drastic action only works for about an hour.

Also, I really wish we cold sort the list. It returns useless info so frequently. I've submitted the bug reports. Anyone on 9.1b4+ who can let us know if it occurs there?

Sorry, but I'm having the same trouble - the biggest problem for me is that I have a recruitment business with 19,000 contacts in the phone ! This bug could be very expensive..

I agree. It is infuriating to search for a contact's name like "Jim" and get search hits for web sites and music and other crap that they want me to buy.

You can turn off those features under setting - general - spotlight Search.

I've installed IOS 9.1 yesterday. So far, spotlight search seems to be OK.

iOS 9.1 installed here and spotlight's results are still limited.

to me its not so much that it doesnt search contacts. It's that it shows only two or three random ones! If I need to search "john", before it would retrieve all the johns, now it only retrieves two, out of the 50 I need!! so annoying. can we keep the iphone working as a phone or do we need to buy a separate phone and keep the iphone as a tablet???

I called Apple - go to settings, general, then reset (at the very bottom), then reset all settings. This won't erase any data only reset to default settings (so you will lose wallpaper & brightness but that's it). It worked and fixed other issues too!

This worked for me, thank you.

I have the same stinking problem. What I found most odd is how it "suddenly" starts working again.

Example: I search for Jennifer....no hit. I scroll down to Jennifer then back up to the top. search for Jennifer again...immediate result.

???

Apple, fix it please.

I tried the suggestion on the first page and they didn't work. Here is what worked for me. Go into settings, iCloud, enable contacts. After that all contacts show up via spotlight once again. You can turn iCloud contacts off again afterwards. This method flushes out the stuck weirdness.