Developer Rusty Mitchell is obsessed with Apple’s Map and Spotlight icons. Lots of interesting bits in this blog post.
For starters, take a look at the iOS 5 and iOS 8 Apple Map snapshots. The major change is the way building outlines are swapped for pictograms.
And the collection of pictograms, shown in the very first image, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Apple Watch icon cluster display.
If this sort of thing interests you even slightly, read the post.
I like a lot of these icons and I see the icons he sees on the map itself. But in spotlight I just see the Maps app icon for each entry.
Where are you located? I have noticed that in some countries, location results don’t appear at all in Spotlight. It is also possible that you may be in an area where the locations haven’t been defined with categories yet.
A top 100 (by population) US city, and the categories do show on the map. There’s no obvious setting that disables this. It’s odd.
Spotlight can be a bit finicky sometimes. You may try restarting your device and then give it a minute after restart before searching. When iOS 8 first came out, the feature was pretty buggy and would reboot my iPhone if I performed several Spotlight searches back-to-back. Also try searching by category for “hospital” or “gas station.” If the Spotlight icon results are enabled in your area, those categories should have a pretty high success rate.
Whatever else, the update to 8.3 fixed this for me.
And hey, it took me this long to notice that you’re the original author. Neat work, thanks.
Glad to hear that it is working properly now and that you enjoyed the writeup.