I thought that for a while, but it does things that go beyond what I can call search. (Search is an elastic term, but not infinitely so.)

For example, it's extraordinarily good at applying the searched-for information (once found) to a specific problem at hand—at least at the first-order level of putting existing pieces together in a correct way. It can do that much faster than I can, with far greater command of detail.

It can also find problems and correct them in my own work in a way that still amazes me. Again, not deep problems—they're first-order in the sense of being obvious deviations from correct practice - but to call this 'search' feels like a stretch. It's not searching for bugs in the code I just wrote and then returning a corrected version, as if one had been sitting somewhere waiting to be found.

Plenty of people insist it goes far beyond these types of things, and they're probably right—I'm not going to say they aren't, since I've been wrong enough times already. My point is that even these first-order things are enough, for me, to refute the it's-just-search view. It does things with search results that in the past, I would have had to do.