In short, this took several days to sort out. And the entire time, it pissed me off because it was entirely avoidable.

On the Mac, there is a simple procedure to rebuild the Spotlight index. This same affordance is not available on iOS.

It just works, my ass.

Spotlight is a database that’s accessed by a lot of processes in a lot of different situations. It’s reasonable to expect that all this activity can uncover bugs that corrupt the index. The kinds of issues that are hard to reproduce, but easy to repair with a simple button labeled “Rebuild”.

Source: Spotlight: Not Right • furbo.org

omg. I am facing this problem on my iphone right now and it is a terrible experience. I’ve been putting off the backup and restore for a couple weeks now hoping that maybe the 26.5 update would cause a reindex. However, that’s not worked either.

Looks like I will have to go through this hard process. Temporarily, I’ve put my main sim into an android phone as I use spotlight so much that the entire experience feels fully broken.