Your Mac and iPhone are building a private search engine in the background. That’s why Spotlight sometimes feels broken.

Apple’s Spotlight is not just a search box. It is a local, on-device index of almost everything on your phone, iPad, Mac, or Vision Pro: documents, emails, messages, photos, notes, contacts, music, settings, and more. Siri can pull from the same index. Apple says the index stays on your device and is not shared with Apple or your other devices....