It happens to me all the time: I’ll be looking for a song in my iPhone’s music library and I end up fruitlessly poking around the menu for a Search button—when all the while, the search box is hiding almost in plain sight.

In many of the iPhone’s core applications—from Mail and Contacts to Notes, Messages, Videos, and yes, Music—there’s a search box sitting quietly behind the title bar at the top of the screen.

The iPhone's "Spotlight" search box will simultaneously scour your mail, messages, music, calendars, and more.

To reveal it, all you have to do is pull down on the screen with your finger.

Mind you, you won’t always find a search box by pulling down on the screen—there’s no search box in the Calendar app, for example, nor is there one in the Photos app.

Then again, there’s always another iPhone search feature you can try: the universal “Spotlight” search box, which you can access by swiping right from the first iPhone home screen.

Spotlight search will scour your contacts, apps, music, videos, notes, mail, calendars and more all at the same time, or you can use it to search the web or Wikipedia for your search term.

It’s an efficient yet easy-to-forget way to quickly jump to, say, a specific song or contact on your iPhone without having to pull up an app first.

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