Q: Spotlight Search shows no results

Same problem as above! And unfortunately can't find many solutions on the net.  I have a regular iPhone 6 and ever since upgrading to iOS 9 spotlight has been erratic, worked perfectly on iOS 8. Now on 9.2.1 the problem still there, only way I can fix it is by turning off all spotlight items, force reset the phone, then turn spotlight items back on. Then after a while it just disappears again, blank results screen. I tried the language thing but it makes no difference. I thought it may be a troublesome app so I only turned contacts back on to see. But after a while it disappeared again! Force resetting my phone everyday isn't a solution.  Does anyone else have this problem and a permanent solution without having to set it up as a new device?? Haven't noticed Apple acknowledging this bug. Btw spotlight works perfectly on my iPad Air 2 so it's clearly an iPhone 6/6 Plus issue.

I'm having the same issue. It used to work intermittently; sometimes if I waited a bit, results would turn up. But now it doesn't work at all.

Siri Suggestions work; if I have those turned on, four app icons will show up when I first activate Spotlight. But if I type anything in the search box, nothing ever appears.

I've tried many things:

• Sending an email to myself (crazy, I know) -- this actually seemed to work for a second; afterward, opening Spotlight showed some things I wasn't used to seeing, and I excitedly entered text into the search box, and everything immediately disappeared again and never came back
• Turning off all Spotlight apps/settings, restarting the phone, hard-restarting the phone, turning off the phone and waiting a minute before turning it on again (another thread)
• Turning off Contact groups then turning them back on again (another thread)
• Changing the language of the phone, rebooting several times, then changing the language back  (apparently recommended by some people)

Absolutely nothing has worked.

What I'm trying now is that I've turned all Spotlight settings off, restarted my phone a couple times, and am just going to let it sit there and think about what it's done. Maybe this afternoon I'll switch Contacts on in Spotlight settings; who knows.

This is on iOS 9.2.1 on an iPhone 6.

Restore the phone from a back up. That fixed it for me.

I tried everything that topdownjimmy said as well.  Eventually I resorted to setting up the iPhone as a new device, through iTunes, then I restored it from my iCloud backup.  Now it works!  For contacts and all the apps that I turned on in settings.  I assume the reinstalling of iOS from scratch is the only fool-proof way to clear these bugs permanently, though don't forget to run a full backup first.  It has blanked out once or twice since, but I think this maybe happens when Spotlight has to reindex or something.

greg2p2r wrote:

 

  I assume the reinstalling of iOS from scratch is the only fool-proof way to clear these bugs permanently, though don't forget to run a full backup first.

No, I simply restored mine from a back up. One step. I didn't restore it as new first. And it solved the issue. Restoring from a back up will restore the iOS and then install your back up. You simply restored the iOS twice. No harm but extra time.

I plugged the phone into my MacBook to do a backup/restore cycle; when I did, it told me that my phone needed to be upgraded to iOS 9.2.1 ... *from* iOS 9.2.1. Weird.

I did the "upgrade," which was essentially an entire re-install of the OS, and Spotlight is back.

So the backup/restore cycle is probably the best bet if everything else fails.

topdownjimmy wrote:

 

I plugged the phone into my MacBook to do a backup/restore cycle; when I did, it told me that my phone needed to be upgraded to iOS 9.2.1 ... *from* iOS 9.2.1. Weird.

 

 

There was an update to iOS 9.2.1 to deal with the Error 53 issue. It was what's called a slipstream update. The version number didn't change.

Thanks, good to know if I ever need to do it again.

It's happened again where the search goes blank,.  This is very weird as the OS is a fresh installation.  I restarted my iPhone and it's fine now.  However it means that there must be some config somewhere in the Spotlight Settings, or it could be location and language settings, or it could be an erroneous app or even a combination of different settings that's causing this glitch.  Really is difficult to tell.

Anyhow will just have to hope that Apple are actually aware of this highly irritating bug and work at squashing it by the next big update.  Would also be nice if wherever you are in the world you had the same version of Spotlight...  Maybe that's a factor.

I haven't seen it again since I restored my phone from back up. I'm using English (U.S.) and U.S. for my region.

Submit feedback to Apple here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback

I submitted feedback thanks.  However it happened again earlier.

If there's anyone technical that knows how iOS works please can you answer this one question.  I closed every app that was sitting in its frozen state by sliding them all off the screen, probably had about 20-30, then I went back to spotlight and it starting working straight away.  Is it possible that they were all clogging up the memory and Spotlight needs a certain amount of free RAM to function?  Or maybe one of the apps I have in background mode is playing up with Spotlight.  Either that, or once again this bug comes and goes randomly.

greg2p2r wrote:

 

I closed every app that was sitting in its frozen state by sliding them all off the screen, probably had about 20-30, then I went back to spotlight and it starting working straight away.

Unless you have a rogue app so some sort, those apps in the recent tray are doing nothing, not using memory or data. I generally have 80-100 (last time I counted I think it was 82). So, the way to test this wouldn't be to delete them all from recents but to delete them one at a time and test. I doubt this was the case for me as I'm using the same apps I was before I restored from back up. So, unless an app has just gotten messed up, and restoring it from a back up fixed it, it seems unlikely (though not impossible). However, as with many things that go wrong with technology, there can be more than one cause.

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)

jfaughnan wrote:

 

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

Restoring from my back up fixed it for me. So, yeah, there is a fix.