Apple search in Photos has always been garbage so I almost always flip over to Google Photos anyway.
The “headline features simply must not slip” cadence is ruining the products. The moneymaker, the iPhone, needs the new OS to work (iPhone 18 hardware has never run on iOS 26), so the OS release can’t be delayed for any reason. The other OSes are lashed to this sinking ship, quality-wise, because they all come out together.
Once per year, everyone has to crunch against an impossible deadline, and something has to give. That thing is quality.
I'll answer your question though: because it doesn't show anywhere the progress of the indexing.
It's on the list there alright.
I didn't know in advance why Siri can't access my photos (turns out it's because indexing isn't done) - at the beginning I thought there was some sort of other problem. Later I figured out (after going through privacy/permissions stuff) that it's too stupid to know why it can't see my photos.
Amateurish.
Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
For example, Android and Google Assistant has had excellent support for Polish for more than a decade. Siri still doesn't support Polish at all, even though all of Apple's AI suppliers support Polish perfectly well...
Why should Apple focus on technical excellence when the company and their products are touted for literally gimmicks? In the end this is what brings the money and profits through the door, can't blame a company for providing what the market craves.
LLMs are eating software, maths, and LinkedIn posts; some of the image generators are seeing similar (limited) success.
Other than that, my general impression is that most people think of even the best as garbage.
("Other than". In fairness, most people thought LinkedIn posts were already garbage, it's just that it wasn't made any worse by LLMs).
They took like 7 years to come out with a foldable iPhone remember - lol!
Now it just says something like "A message in a different language".