I think RAG actually refers to something like a chatbot that gets web results behind the scenes and then uses them in its generation context.

I think “semantic search” is a term that I have heard people use regularly for what the OP is talking about.

And then “neural retrieval” which I think only I have used on this page could probably also refer to when they use llms to make ranking decisions for results that were retrieved with a notmal keyword search.

Yeah I should call it 'Vibe RAG' lol.