The Unified Search Service is a search engine that is included with BlackBerry® Device Software 6.0 and later. BlackBerry® device users interact with the Unified Search Service primarily from the Universal search feature by clicking the search icon on the Home screen. Developers can use Unified Search Service through the Unified Search API. You can use the API to include your application data in the Service's content repository, and search the content index from your application.

For example, imagine that you have a large collection of books and you loan them to people frequently. It might be useful to create an application that allows you to catalog your books, and keep a list of people to whom you loan them. If this application used the Unified Search API, you could search for a book from the Home screen, or any application, to find the book and contact details for the person who holds it.

As a developer, you control whether your data appears in searches that users perform from the Home screen of a BlackBerry device, other applications on the device, or your application only. In addition, you can search data from other applications when that data is registered in the Unified Search Service.

• Making data findable
  
• Define an EntityBasedSearchable class for your SearchableEntity objects
  
• Encapsulate your data in the SearchableEntity class
  
• Register your EntityBasedSearchable object with the Unified Search Service
  
• Notify the Unified Search Service about changes to your data
  
• Listening for responses from the Unified Search Service
  
• Removing your data from the content repository
  
• Using other search engines
  
• Ensure that a device runs a single instance of your application
  
• Inserting data when a device starts
  
• Searching