Looking to find the proverbial needle in a haystack on your Droid 2? It can seem like an insurmountable problem. After all, the Droid 2’s haystack is rather large, including contacts, maps, social networking sites like Facebook, and the entire Web.
It could take you quite a long time to find a needle in all that hay if you didn’t have the Droid 2’s universal search, which searches all of the above in one fell swoop. Here’s what universal search scans to find matches for you:
Contacts. Search through first and last names, and also company names. It lists names as well as phone numbers in the results.
Browser. Looks through your bookmarks and web history.
Kindle. If you have the Android Kindle book-reading app from Amazon on your Droid 2, universal search looks through the titles and authors of the books you’ve downloaded.
Note
When you first unpacked and used your Droid 2, it may not have had the Kindle app on it, and you may never have downloaded it. Yet the app is most likely on your Droid 2 all the same. That’s because Motorola regularly installs software updates on your phone wirelessly. (It’s called an over the air update, or OTA.) During one of those updates—update 1.13.604 to be very precise—the Kindle was installed.
Google search. Lists popular Google searches that include your search term. It also includes search terms you’ve already used on Google, even those that you’ve used on a computer, not on your phone.
Titles of installed apps. It searches through the names of apps you’ve downloaded. Tap a name to launch the app.
Contacts on social media sites. Universal search doesn’t just search through the contacts on your phone—it also searches through contacts on social networking sites whose apps you’ve installed, such as Facebook.
Note
Universal search isn’t quite universal. It doesn’t search through your email or calendar. You’ll have to search them individually.
Launching a search across your entire Droid 2 is about as simple as it gets: Press the Search button. A search box appears at the top of the page, and the keyboard appears. Tap in your text, and the Droid 2 does its magic. As you tap, universal search displays its results, narrowing the results as you type and your search term gets more specific. Eight search results show up on your screen. Tap any result to open it—to open a contact, to visit a web page, to launch an app, and so on.
You may notice something odd and somewhat annoying about the results. Most of the time the results are solely or primarily web searches, with some results from your apps mixed in. You may not see a contact showing, even if you know you’re searching for someone’s name in your Contacts list.
There are two potential issues here. The first is that the Droid 2 search lists only eight results on its screen, and it lists what it thinks the most important eight results are. It weights those results toward web searches, and toward searching apps on your Droid 2. So if it determines that the contact is of less importance than those web searches and app searches, you’re out of luck.
The second issue is that Universal search might not be configured to search through your Contacts at all. You customize what to search for when you press the Search key, and there’s a chance that your Droid 2 is configured to search the Web and your apps, but nothing else.
What to do? First, check how your search is configured. Tap the Google logo 
to the left of the search box, and a toolbar drops down that shows you what your Droid 2 has been set up to search. To add more categories to search, such as Contacts and Music (or to remove categories from the search), tap the gear icon 
on the upper right of the toolbar.
A list appears that shows all the categories the Droid 2 will search. Turn on the checkboxes next to any that you want searched, and turn off those you don’t want searched. When you’re back on the Search screen, tap the Google logo. You see that you’re now searching the new categories you added, and not searching any that you’ve removed.
Tip
You can also get to the screen for configuring which categories to search by pressing the Menu key and tapping Search Settings→“Searchable items”.
That won’t necessarily solve the problem of the Droid 2 not showing results from Contacts (or Music, say), because it still shows only the first eight results, and a contact or piece of music may not be in the top eight. But there’s an easy fix. Type your search term, tap the Google logo, and then tap the category you want to search—for example, Contacts. You then search only Contacts, and the top eight results will appear.
You’re given some control—not a lot, but some—over how universal search works. To tweak it, when you’re in Search, press the Menu key and then select Search Settings. On the screen that appears, you’ll find three ways to tweak your search. (For more details about these settings, see Search.)
Tip
You can also get to this screen when you’re at the Home screen or on a pane. Press the Menu key and select Settings→Search.
Google search. >From here, you can customize the way Droid 2’s universal search integrates with Google search. Out of the box, the Droid 2’s universal search shows suggestions from Google and results from your search history as you tap. It also uses your location to deliver searches most relevant to where you currently are. You can turn those features off if you want. You can also manage the way your Google account handles search, just as if you were managing it on the Web.
Searchable items. As detailed earlier in this chapter, you can customize which categories you search.
Clear shortcuts. The Droid 2 keeps track of search results that you’ve recently chosen and then displays shortcuts to those results when you do a relevant search. Clear those shortcuts by tapping this selection.
