Spotlight App Integration

[mundas88]

So App Developers have started integrating their Apps into Spotlight. I was really looking forward to this, however, it seems to only display "cached" results.

Let me explain:
The IMDB app will only display movies in Spotlight if i already searched for that particular movie inside the IMDB app and tapped on it. For everything else, i get no Spotlight results. So I return to the IMDB app and search for that second movie, suddenly Spotlight will start displaying that as well.
What good is that?

Other case in point: Translation ("Linguee" App). Sure, it will show me translations when I search for English words in Spotlight. But only if I searched that exact term inside the Linguee App before. Am I supposed to search through all the possible searches I might ever want to make?

So the question is: Is this it? Am I doing something wrong? Is it my device? Or is it really not supposed to work with "huge" databases and more fit for "personal" stuff like Pocket or Instapaper? That would be quite a letdown..

 

[rorschach]

So App Developers have started integrating their Apps into Spotlight. I was really looking forward to this, however, it seems to only display "cached" results.

Let me explain:
The IMDB app will only display movies in Spotlight if i already searched for that particular movie inside the IMDB app and tapped on it. For everything else, i get no Spotlight results. So I return to the IMDB app and search for that second movie, suddenly Spotlight will start displaying that as well.
What good is that?

Other case in point: Translation ("Linguee" App). Sure, it will show me translations when I search for English words in Spotlight. But only if I searched that exact term inside the Linguee App before. Am I supposed to search through all the possible searches I might ever want to make?

So the question is: Is this it? Am I doing something wrong? Is it my device? Or is it really not supposed to work with "huge" databases and more fit for "personal" stuff like Pocket or Instapaper? That would be quite a letdown..

So there are two indexes for the Spotlight searching with apps (per this developer article).

One is a private, on-device index that does not get sent to Apple. This generally applies to stuff that you've already viewed/searched for in the app.

The other is app content that Apple indexes on their servers.

Developers choose how different content gets indexed. The server-side content will take some time for Apple to index as apps are updated. IMDb's content is probably still being indexed, so that's why -- for now -- you may only see stuff you've searched for in the app. Soon enough, though, this should work more consistently.