While Apple embraces AI with iOS 18, it's continuing to enhance how users get answers in a more old-fashioned way than before: through Spotlight Search. That particular useful tool can be opened by swiping down on the middle of the Home Screen. Already it's helping iPhone users find things on their device and on the web-increasingly as an alternative to using Google Search. One of the goals of Apple with iOS 18 seems to be to allow people to find the content inside apps using natural, or "semantic," queries.

Already, Spotlight has enabled the search of content in developers' apps but only return results if search terms matched exactly. However, with the new addition this year of semantic search capabilities, people will be able to search for content in apps using search terms similar in meaning, Apple reported to developers at WWDC 2024 held this week.

With this Core Spotlight framework, developers can now attach any content they want to be searchable through Spotlight, which then resides in a private index on the users' devices, of which other apps cannot access. Thus, this new semantic capability will definitely make sure Spotlight's understanding of developers' content a lot improved, with the reason that the users will be allowed to look for any sort of content inside applications in their own manner. These types of search queries leverage machine learning models that are downloaded to the device and run in the app's process and can be loaded or unloaded at any time, Apple said.

Also, as users start using Spotlight search, developers will be able to improve the ranking over time of their app's results by sending signals to Spotlight when an iPhone owner interacts with one of their results.

For instance, if one had entered the name of a local hiking trail while searching for it, the semantic search functionality would return appropriate results for the search query entered by that user, based on the entities it knew, such as where the trail is located or some keywords, even though these could not be part of the name of the trail and were not an exact match. Apart from that, the developer can prioritize some of his/her content over others in any way required. This helps them do things like highlight a trail that a user had bookmarked so that it shows up higher in the search results.

The bottom line here is that the user searches for a trail they are interested in with a natural language query in Spotlight, digs up that trail much more easily through these enhanced results, and then can tap on a result to be taken straight to the trail's page in the developer's hiking trails app. This update further enables Siri to better understand what content is inside an app, Apple said.

In any case, this is a much more under-the-hood update and not as flashy as the AI-powered Siri or ChatGPT integration we've so far heard rumors of, but this type of an under-the-hood update will definitely make for an improved experience for iPhone users when they are turning to Spotlight to find information from their apps or even for those who use Spotlight as an alternative to web search.