Sort of depends on how well the core reasoning works. It’s not a big effort to connect an LLM to a search provider.

You do pay for the tokens, but in theory on a smaller model each token is cheaper.

honestly using search isn't that great, you mostly get SEO slop, it usually won't help the model ask the right questions

	▲	everforward 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		When I messed with it I used Kagi's search and I didn't have that issue (not claiming they're the best, they're the only one I tried). They filter their results through their AI, though, so you get a sort of meta-summary of the top few results. It did well with geopolitical news stuff, but I've not tried a hard science sort of query.
	▲	dannyw a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Try Parallel.ai (no affiliation). Instead of keywords, the model writes objectives.