In Spotlight, I need “passw” to see it. In the actual Settings search, I also need “passw”, and that only gets it to #5 in the list.

Also, Spotlight is bizarrely slow finding even local apps and things like Passwords. WTF

Did you tell it to ignore most local files?

Wow! Just discovered the Spotlight customization and it is so much faster and more useful when you remove certain locations and turn off definitions and Siri suggestions.

That sounds delightful. Sadly, while Apple documents “Suggestions in Search”, and I can even see that option when I search Settings for Siri, the option itself is missing from the Siri & Search page.

I get the same result as the parent. Search in Settings has gotten a lot worse with time.

When I type just "p" it's the second top most result. When I type "pa" it's already the first result.

Bizarre. That's on iOS for me, searching in the settings app itself. I have to type most of "passwords" just to get it to show up at all, and some of the ones that are showing up instead have only the most tenuous connection to the search term "password".

It used to show up for me after a couple letters, in the settings app, until a few iOS versions ago, IIRC.

It "learns" from previous searches.

Which is unfortunate, because it's not very good at it.

Anecdata: `pas` worked for me in Spotlight, Settings (both 13.3 Beta (22E5246b)) and Alfred (4.8 [1312]).