Spotlight News – Remove Headlines from iOS Spotlight Search

i have just hopefully cured my problem - delete all the stuff you want gone, go backup your device, then go to delete all data and settings on your fone and choose restore from back up - then your device should be as it was but without the old deleted data saved

Finder's search, as well as many other programs (Alfred, Outlook, etc.) use Spotlight's index files. If you have Spotlight shut off, you won't be able to get Finder search working natively.

There are a few free third party apps that you can use to search for files without using Apple's system:

1. Find Any File
2. EasyFind

These two do not use spotlight's index files and should work independently.