No LLMs are not 'search'. Search as in google or a database query is deterministic. Are there results for x query? If there are we can return them. If there aren't we can't return anything.

LLMs do not work that way. LLMs do not have a conception of facts. Any query you make to an LLM has an output. The quality of that output depends on the training data. For high probability output you might think the LLM is returning the correct 'facts'. For low probability output you might think the LLM is hallucinating.

LLMs are not search. They are a fundamentally different thing from search. Most code is 100% deterministic. The program is executed exactly in order. LLMs are not 100% deterministic.

No. LLMs are NLP engines.

LLM-based chatbots can be used as mediocre, hallucination-prone search engines if you so choose. They’re especially bad if the answer you’re looking for is not an average of “collective wisdom” or opinion but a very specific fact that needs to be distinguished from other similar or related but ultimately very different facts. And even worse if the fact you’re looking for is not among the more frequently discussed ones in that cluster of similar or related facts.

It's even simpler. It's just 1's and 0's.

You're being reductive to the point that you're saying "LLMs are an algorithm like auto complete/search engine, therefore they're the same."

That's not how it works. They're different approaches to how they handle the same inputs.