Technology

Maybe now, but definitely not originally. Apple grew the Maps ecosystem originally for feature parity reasons, not privacy ones. That's at least a bit more similar to the Search situation.

Turn-by-turn was the killer feature back in iPhone 4S time frame, and Google refused to allow it iOS, shipping it only on Android. Apple had some geographic features (reverse geo lookup specifically, iirc) prior to this in-house and had started developing their own maps because of the longstanding tension with iOS and Android, but Apple rushed to get turn-by-turn directions out the door in mid-2012, which is partially what caused it to launch pretty half-baked. Google introduced a dedicated Google Maps app on the iOS App Store in late 2012 with turn-by-turn in response to losing millions of daily-active users to the launch of Apple Maps.

Here's a retrospective from 2013 by The Guardian on the whole thing with a lot more detail:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/11/apple-maps-google-iphone-users

Now, Apple has run a web crawler since at least 2015:

https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-06-apple-web-crawler.html

Apple has been steadily building up its search expertise for the last decade. Notably, it acquired Topsy back in 2015, which was a search engine mostly based on Twitter data:

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-shuts-down-topsy-the-200-million-mystery-laid-to-rest-2015-12?op=1

... then launched a few web-based Spotlight search integrations a few years later (which I can't find a good source for) which integrated common web searches for things like weather and news directly into Spotlight.

IMO, based on the above (and maybe a bit more), Apple's explanation in the article doesn't tell the full story. It doesn't want to build it, but it could. This is more is about Apple wanting to keep extracting the money from Google and not having to build another also-ran service to directly compete.