Chapter 34. Searching Your iPad with Spotlight
If you want to find an app, a song, a video, an email message, or another item stored on your iPad, you have two choices. You could manually search your iPad, which takes time and still doesn’t guarantee that you’ll find what you want. A much faster and more accurate method is to search your iPad using Spotlight.
In this chapter, you will learn how to use Spotlight to search for apps, songs, videos, and email messages on your iPad.
Searching with Spotlight
Spotlight is a special feature that essentially acts like a search engine on your iPad. Just type all or part of a word, and Spotlight tries to find an item that matches your search criteria. Spotlight can find nine types of items:
Apps
Audiobooks
Calendar appointments
Contacts
Mail messages
Music
Notes
Podcasts
Video
To search for any of these items, follow these steps:
From the Home screen, swipe your finger from left to right. The Spotlight screen appears with a Search iPad field at the top and the virtual keyboard at the bottom, as shown in Figure 34-1. (You can also get to the Spotlight search page by pressing the Home button when you’re at the Home screen.)
Tap the Search iPad field, and type part of the word that represents what you want to find. For example, if you want to find a name stored in your Contacts app, type that name. If you want to find a note in the Notes app that contains certain information such as your to-do list, type a word that you know appears on that note such as milk or eggs. As you type each letter, Spotlight displays the items that match your search criteria, as shown in Figure 34-2.
Tap the item you want, such as a song, an app, or a note. Your iPad displays or plays your chosen item.
Customizing Spotlight
Spotlight can help you find almost anything stored on your iPad in an instant (just as long as you know what word to type to find that item). To make Spotlight work even faster or more accurately, you can define what items Spotlight should find and in what order Spotlight should search for those items.
For example, suppose you’re a music collector and store thousands of songs on your iPad. Since finding a particular song may be more important than finding an audiobook or email message stored on your iPad, you can tell Spotlight to search only for music.
You can also customize the order that Spotlight searches for things. That way, if email messages are more important to you than audiobooks, tell Spotlight to search through your email messages first and not bother searching for audiobooks until you’ve searched for everything else.
To customize Spotlight, follow these steps:
From the Home screen, tap Settings. The Settings screen appears.
Tap General. The General settings screen appears.
Tap Spotlight Search. The Spotlight Search settings screen appears, as shown in Figure 34-3.
Tap any item such as Music, Podcasts, or Mail. Spotlight will search for any item with a check mark next to it and ignore any items that do not have a check mark next to them.
Place your fingertip over the three horizontal lines at the far right of an item, and slide your finger up or down. This lets you rearrange the order that Spotlight searches for items starting from the top.
Press the Home button. The Home screen appears. Try your search again, and see the results!
Additional Ideas for Searching with Spotlight
If you collect dozens of apps, trying to find the one app you want can involve swiping through multiple panes of the Home screen. For a faster method, just swipe to reveal the Spotlight screen, and type the name of the app you want to run.
If you store notes in the Notes app, give each note a descriptive heading. Not only will this help you organize your notes within the Notes app, but it will also make it easier for Spotlight to find your note again if you can remember part of the heading you gave for the note you want to find (such as “To-Do” or “Daily Goals”).
With Spotlight on your iPad, you can quickly search for anything you’ve stored so you don’t have to worry where you put it. As long as you know what you called it, you’ll be able to find it again courtesy of Spotlight.