I mean, search has always been built on some kind of LLM. That’s how you convert a query into a list of page-results.

no it fucking hasn’t. the stemming and page ranking algorithms used in traditional search have absolutely nothing to do with LLMs.

shit, neither stemming nor PageRank as originally defined even have a machine learning component. here’s postgres’ full text search suite, which literally converts a textual query into a list of results (sans page ranking, which is out of scope for a database) in a manner suitable for a production search engine, utterly without any machine learning or other stochastic crap.