It searches the web as well as your local drives, so sending those searches out is exactly what I'd expect. Now, I can also see the case for not making 'do a web search too' the default, but if you can't have that and not share your searches with Apple.
Isn't what people are getting hot and bothered about is that "local" searches are sending data out on the internet, rather than where they happen to be sending it?
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"
One of the problems is that you can set your search provider as DDG, and the query still goes to Apple too. GP posits that this is an essential part of doing a web search.
