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iOS 9: Intelligent search with Spotlight on iPad

Spotlight search enables you to search your iPad for contacts, apps, music, video, audio books, notes, emails, calendar entries, messages, and more.

Spotlight is located at the top of any Home screen page and can be opened by swiping down on the screen. Be aware, however, that swiping too close to the top will open Notification Center instead. After searching for an item, go ahead and tap on the relevant result.

Improvements added with iOS 9 make Spotlight search more useful than ever. You can search for practically anything here and Spotlight will do its best to give you a relevant spread of results. It will show a mix of content from your device – apps, contacts, emails etc. – along with results from the internet.

Tap any of the results to be taken to the relevant app.

Third-party search

Another big change is that you can now search for content within supported third-party apps. This means that as well as being able to search through Messages and Notes, Spotlight can also find useful content from your other apps.

For example, you can search for documents kept in Dropbox, recipes from Yummly or songs tagged in Shazam. Tapping the result will not only open the app for you but take you straight to the relevant page.

You can even try this out with this app – try searching iPad questions to see results fromTips & Tricks that will link you right back to this very app!

This feature only works on the iPad 3 and newer devices, and requires iOS 9 or above.