There needs to be retrieval, but ranking can be fully offloaded to LLMs and they would probably do better. Legacy search engines do both parts, and their ranking is highly gameable judging by how SEOed they are.
reply> ranking can be fully offloaded to LLMs
replyIf someone searches for "mexican food" you require ranking anyway because you aren't going to load those ten bazillion hits into the LLM first.
Spoiler: regular search ranking doesn't see very many results, either. I mean, have you seen the results for a crowded query like this? They are trash.
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