That said it's a bit weird to download a webpage of several megabytes that allows you to input a search that takes seconds to return a result, just to do the eq

That said it's a bit weird to download a webpage of several megabytes that allows you to input a search that takes seconds to return a result, just to do the equivalent of a text search on a text file that's likely smaller than the webpage itself. This isn't true for all search engines, but it is true for quite a few of them.