The search cache

Answers from your index are kept on the phone for a short while and reused, so asking the same thing twice does not spend your plan's search bandwidth twice.

Me › Settings › Search cache:

• Reuse an answer for this many seconds: at least 60, at most a day; it starts at 60. Save puts it in force, and the line under the field says what is in force now.
• Clear cache (N) says how many answers are held and throws them all away. It clears this phone's cache and nothing else.

• Kept: searches and their pages, the facets behind the filters, the groups of similar photos and the photos in them, autocomplete, and the photos the map draws.
• Never kept: anything written or deleted, the one read of your index into the phone's copy, the configuration checks, and a search that had to fall back to words only.

What you change is never stale: saving tags, deleting photos and every finished sync empty the cache at once. Pulling the grid down and the reload button always ask the index itself.

This cache is separate from the phone's copy of the index. Clearing it leaves the copy alone, so browsing, Stats and suggestions keep working.