New iOS9 Spotlight search not finding contacts

I tried two fixes, and this one seemed to work after playing around with it for a while:

Fix #1 (didn't seem to work, but may have helped)

1. Turn off all the Spotlight switches in Preferences > General > Spotlight.
2. Do a hard reset by pressing and holding the Home button (big circle below the screen) and the Sleep/Wake button (on top of the iPhone) simultaneously.
3. Hold both buttons until the screen goes black, and then release when you see the Apple logo.
4. After restart, turn on the Contacts switch in Preferences > General > Spotlight.
5. It may take a few minutes, or half an hour for Contacts to show in Spotlight search.
6. Turn on other Spotlight switches after Contacts begin to show in Spotlight searches.

Fix #2

1. Open the Contacts app, tap your own contact... Then Groups will display in top left. Tap Groups in the top-left corner, then Hide All Contacts or show all contacts. One of them may default. Tapping just toggles back and forth between the 2 options. The IOS 9 update may have defaulted your option to Hide All which may be the only issue.

2. Tap Show All Contacts.

This didn't immediately work for me, but then I tried only showing iCloud contacts, and not Facebook contacts, and then it started to work. However - I noticed some contacts starting to appear after a search, which is when I tried this in the last sentence. It may very well have been the first fix that solved this, and it was just a matter of waiting for it to work.

Try both, and also showing different contacts groups, then quitting the contacts app, then hiding and showing again.

The spotlight process that indexes space on iOS needs several things to run:

• space to write the results to storage
• time to index all the content after a change/upgrade

If you have let the phone run for several hours and have checked for more than 1 GB of free space, there might be some other corruption that are breaking things.

At that point:

1. Make a back up of the phone (perhaps two backups one to iCloud and another to iTunes)
2. Power cycle the device
3. Verify the storage isn't leaving less than 1 GB of free space
4. Turn off wifi network and bluetooth using AirPlane mode (which minimizes changes to let the index process run to completion)
5. Power cycle the device while in AirPlane mode.
6. Wait another 30 minutes for search to process to get caught up
7. Retore the phone
8. Test with only contacts and not restoring the backup

At this point, you would likely need Apple Support to triage why a cleanly restored phone with only contacts on it still isn't having spotlight work. Most likely, you will have removed the likely cause of software corruption or free space issues during the restore.