How Far Are LLMs from Real Search: Rethinking the Complementary Roles of Search and Learning

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Search plays a fundamental role in problem-solving across various domains, with most real-world decision-making problems being solvable through systematic search. Drawing inspiration from recent discussions on search and learning, we systematically explore the complementary relationship between search and Large Language Models (LLMs) from three perspectives. First, we analyze how learning can enhance search efficiency and propose Se arch vi a L earning ( SeaL ), a framework that leverages LLMs for effective and efficient search. Second, we further extend SeaL to SeaL-C to ensure rigorous completeness during search. Our evaluation across three real-world planning tasks demonstrates that SeaL achieves near-perfect accuracy while reducing search spaces by up to 99.1% compared to traditional approaches. Finally, we explore how far LLMs are from real search by investigating whether they can develop search capabilities independently. Our analysis reveals that while current LLMs struggle with efficient search in complex problems, incorporating systematic search strategies significantly enhances their problem-solving capabilities. These findings not only validate the effectiveness of our approach but also highlight the need for improving LLMs’ search abilities for real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/ventr1c/SeaL .