Get Your Search On: Search Tips and Tricks

By far one of my favorite new features in iPhone 3.0 is Spotlight. Those unfamiliar with the Mac technology, it’s essentially a super fast, smart search system. In iPhone 3.0 Spotlight has been added to iPod, Notes, Mail, and Calendar, in addition to the Phone app. This means that you can search for a song in the iPod, a mail message in Mail, or appointment in Calendar. But here’s where things get crazy awesome. Swiping to the left of the first home page (the little spotlight icon) will let you search through your entire iPhone. How awesome is that? In addition to results from those apps, Spotlight also finds apps for quick launching.

Keep reading for some awesome search-related tips!

So you probably get the basic gist of Spotlight. Start typing the name of an app and it’ll show up in the list for quick launching. You can also search for a contact, note, etc. But how do you organize those search results? Hit up Settings>General>Home>Search Results and you can rearrange the result categories any way you like. You can even disable categories from showing up all together. Awesome!

Now here’s my favorite trick. You know those bookmark icons you can make with Safari? Those actually show up in Spotlight! This means that you can make a shortcut to the mobile version of Flickr on your Home screen and easily bring it up just by typing a few characters in Spotlight. Give it a try!

Lastly, here’s a super quick way to get to the search field. As you know from one of my earlier tips, hitting the Home button from any Home page will bring you to the first screen. Now when you hit the Home button from the first Home screen, you’ll be taken to Spotlight. Trust me, this trick helps a lot.

If you have any search trips or tricks you’d like to share, let us know below!

via iphonealley.com