A search engine finds and ranks existing documents that already contain an answer, then lets you read the source yourself. A language model doesn't look anything up by default — it generates a brand-new answer word by word based on patterns it learned during training, which means it can summarize, explain, or combine ideas in ways a search engine can't, but it also can't point you to where "its" answer came from unless it's specifically connected to live search or retrieval tools.