Develosaur search is one verb, not five different tools an agent has to choose between. What changes is the mode, and the default mode is the cheap one.
Exact match, the default
Plain substring matching on a node's title or content, free to call and the first thing to reach for. Most searches are this: does a node with this word in it already exist, what did we write about this feature before, is there a task with this name.
Placement, before you create anything
The mode that answers a different question: not "does this text exist" but "is there already a node this new one belongs under or would duplicate." A candidate scoring high enough on similarity is a signal to extend that node with a child instead of creating a parallel one next to it. This is the mode a create step is supposed to run before it writes anything, which is exactly why duplicate branches are rare rather than a constant cleanup job: the check happens before the write, not as a tidy-up after several agents have all created their own version of the same task.
Related, from a node you already have
Given a node, its semantic neighbors: other tasks touching the same concept even if they never share a word with it. Useful for the question "what else in this project connects to this," which a substring search cannot answer because relatedness is not the same thing as shared vocabulary.
Semantic, from a phrase
The other direction: given a phrase, nodes that mean something close to it, whether or not any of the words match. "Sign-in flow" and "the OAuth screen" can be the same idea in two different nodes, and this is the mode that finds the second one when you searched for the first.
Decisions, pulled out of everything
Bodies accumulate a lot of prose over a project's life, and a decision made three months ago inside a long node is easy to lose. This mode searches specifically for decision write-ups across the whole project, so "why did we choose this" has an actual answer to find instead of a vague memory that someone settled it once.
Why one verb instead of five
An agent, or a person searching the board, does not have to remember which endpoint answers which kind of question. It asks the same way every time and changes only how narrowly it wants the question read. The mode that matters most in practice is placement, because it is the one standing between a plan that stays coherent and a board slowly filling with three versions of the same task, an idea covered in more depth in I shipped Develosaur using Develosaur.
More on what the board does is on the features page, and more of these are on the blog.