My argument, thus, goes as follows: If, as a company, you care about something only so little that you are not willing to invest an hours' worth of profit, you probably don't care about it at all. I don't fault Apple for not caring about privacy. Few companies do. I fault them for posing as caring about privacy when their behaviour clearly demonstrates that they care very little.
1: Yes, Apple's hires won't probably have the same skill set as the DDG team. And yes, scaling a search engine from 9M queries a day to what Apple Search would be hit with would take a fair bit of effort. I'm trying to illustrate a point here, so just bear with me ;-)
The WWDC session on Search API covered its current uses, and some of the privacy controls they've built into it.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683 https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=709
> No you wouldn't. A search engine is difficult to build, expensive to build, and hard to do right.
DuckDuckGo appear to do pretty well for themselves, running on $3m of funding and with a team of 21 people. I'm guessing Apple invests more in their products' packaging design than that. If their users' privacy were a concern to them, searching in Safari would use Apple's (privacy-conscious) search engine, and (until Apple perfected their search index) pipe in results from Bing/Google/whomever, just as DDG does.