My understanding is that modern search engines are using embeddings / vector search under the hood.
So even if LLM's aren't directly passing a vector to the search engine, my assumption is that the search engine is converting to a vector and searching.
Fair, and maybe key point here is that it uses embeddings to help with the search results along with many manual heuristics in place. I hardly think google search works just by dumping embeddings then doing KNN's and calling it a day.
So even if LLM's aren't directly passing a vector to the search engine, my assumption is that the search engine is converting to a vector and searching.
"You interact with embeddings every time you complete a Google Search" from https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/embedd...