I'm not convinced of that. Apple is in a position to invent a search engine, make it real pretty (if not as powerful), and slap it as the default on iOS Safari. Throw in some claims that "it's the most private" so the apple fan base eats it up, and I think apple would take a significant chunk of iOS searches overnight.
It seems like an obvious win, but Apple are terrible when it comes to building web services. They don’t have the capability to pull this off in-house and they don’t seem willing to bring in leadership from their competitors to improve on that front. An acquihire or partnership seems to be the only way Apple could get this done successfully.