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The article suggests that Apple should buy DuckDuckGo, a much smaller player than the top-3 (Google, Bing, Yahoo) for fear of being "uncomfortably dependent on Bing". First, if Apple wanted a search engine, they could have acquired Yahoo for ~4BN a few years back when it went up for sale. Second, as has been mentioned multiple times, DDG's organic search results come from Bing.

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Yahoo isn't a search engine and hasn't been for years. Just check the "Powered by Bing™" at the bottom of every search result. That leaves just two search engines, Google and Bing. Not counting non-US search engines that may have significant market share in their respective countries.

In the years before the acquisition by Verizon, while Marissa Mayer was still CEO, Yahoo had rebooted its own search engine, an effort that was abandoned shortly before the sale. At that time, Apple could have very well acquired a formidable search engine if they wanted to.

Nothing coming out of Yahoo has been “formidable” in over two decades.

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