We’re not entirely sure how long this ‘bug’ (or ‘intended function) has been lingering in iOS but we’ve noticed since iOS 8.1.2 that, unlike its OS X cousin, Spotlight in iOS appears unable to produce comprehensive results for Calendar entries.
Despite our attempts at discerning the severity, Its difficult to say with certainty the exact limitation on iOS Spotlight’s results.
For example, at time of writing it is now currently the year 2015. Say, you have been a diligent user of Calendar and have kept the last few years up to date with daily entries and now you want to find an entry that you made some time in 2014 or farther back?
Lets say an event that only occurs once in a lifetime, thereby guaranteeing its uniqueness in your Calendar entries, entitled something like “Grandpa’s 50th birthday bbq” which occurred either some time early 2014 or any time in 2013.
Chances are if you enter “Grandpa’s 50th birthday bbq” in iOS Spotlight (accessed by swiping down on the device screen) or the Search field of Calendar, neither will return any result.
From general observation our guess is there might be a limitation on Spotlight’s (and Calendar search which is powered by the same Spotlight) ability to find Calendar entries older than a year from the current date.
So in our example above, assuming we run our iOS Spotlight search for “Grandpa’s 50th birthday bbq” at time of writing, i.e. 26 january 2015, if this event was at a date earlier than 26 January 2014 it would not appear as a Spotlight result.
Thereby forcing iOS users to manually scroll through years of entries to find the event on their own sans the efficacy which Spotlight purports to facilitate.
Please leave a comment if you find that our discovery is totally erroneous or a workaround for this, otherwise, please be a lamb and rally to improve our communal iOS experience by submitting your request for improvement at Apple’s Feedback page.