I don't even disagree with you. It's just that my perception of "caring about something" differs from yours. My point being, building a search engine can be done (and done well) with little resources. For comparison: Apple makes about as much profit per hour as DDG had in (total) funding. And (assuming an average tenure of 5 years), Apple hires three times the amount of people a day that make the DDG team. ^1

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 ;-)

Why not? A search engine is one of the biggest leaks of information to third-parties. Apple has its own encrypted messaging system, and a search engine wouldn't be as big a project as that.

Please tell me you are kidding! A search engine is easier than an encrypted messaging system? Seriously?

Yeah, I would think so. You don't even need user accounts.