[gutnor]

Yes, people that knows the difference between local searches and online searches are probably upset about it.

As a HN user, I'm in that category of people. However, I was surprised, when using my phone that I expected Spotlight to search both locally and online. The difference is that I never use spotlight on my mobile, I just don't have that much stuff to look locally, so I had fresh user expectation: "cool I can make search anywhere", so when spotlight did not do it was a bit of a let down and since then I have never used Spotlight on IOS again, I just open the browser.

Not saying that Apple is right or anything, but the reasoning may simply be "if I have a global search button not looking online by default, will regular user not think of that as a bug"