Search

Spotlight search in Apple iOS 9, compared to earlier versions, has been made much more prominent and personal. With suggestions from Siri and integration opportunities for third-party apps, iPhone’s search functionality is no longer limited to the scope of Apple’s own apps. In this article, Toptal engineer Richard Forsythe explores some iOS SDK functionalities that allow apps to make content available to the user via Spotlight search.

When coming across the term “text search,” one usually thinks of a large body of text which is indexed in a way that makes it possible to quickly look up one or more search terms when they are entered by a user. This is a classic problem in computer science to which many solutions exist.

But how about a reverse scenario? What if what’s available for indexing beforehand is a group of search phrases, and only at runtime is a large body of text presented for searching?