Spotlight, the search utility for Mac OS X, was migrated initially to iOS 3.0 and remains a viable part of iOS 4.0 and higher. It's very useful, and since its initial release it's gained some nice features. This week, we'll show you some tips that'll help you get the most out of this utilitarian feature.
You can access Spotlight from any iOS Home screen by pressing the Home button once when you are on primary screen, or by simply swiping left while the Spotlight screen is displayed.
If you are on a different screen, press the Home key once to get Home, pause briefly, and Press Home again to open Spotlight (or simply swipe left instead of pressing Home again).
You can use Spotlight to search your entire device for apps, songs, and e-mails. Simply start typing the word, name of an app, name of a song, or e-mail content you are seeking and your iOS device will display it as you type. I currenty have 291 apps on my iPhone and not all of them will display at once since they are distributed in folders across three available Home screens, so this feature comes in handy when I need to launch an app I cannot see. If you see an app appear in the search results, tap it and it will launch.
If there are no results available, iOS will let you choose to search for your item on the internet or Wikipedia. If you choose the former, Safari will launch and use its default search engine (usually Google, depending on your own settings) to search for your item. If you use Wikipedia, Safari is launched and search results from the search term's Wikipedia page will be displayed.
Some of the built-in iOS apps that support Spotlight are: Mail, iPod, Music (on an iPod touch), and Contacts. In all these apps, to access the Spotlight you need to swipe down to reveal the Spotlight search field. This search will be performed on data native to the particular app so its scope is limited. For example, in the Contacts app, it will only show results from that particular app's database. It does not currently support the capability to search your entire device as Spotlight does from the Home screen.
iOS will let you customize the arrangement of your Spotlight search results. You can inventory apps, contacts and music however you like.
Launch the Settings app, tap General > Spotlight Search and you'll see something like this:
You can customize the order of your search results by tapping an item to select or deselect it; this controls whether or not that item will appear in the Spotlight search results. If the item is checked it will show up in the results.
If you tap and hold this symbol: 
you can rearrange the items selected by dragging it up and down the list while holding your finger firmly on the touch screen.
Once you are satisfied with how your search results are arranged, you can press the Home button to save your customizations or tap the General button at the upper left side of the screen.
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