By constantly downloading random information from the internet, wouldn’t you be exposing yourself to tons of malicious content? Aren’t there pages that can run malware without you even clicking on anything?
A better example than search engines might be something like “the wayback machine”, a site that actually saves the pages, and not just links.
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When you click on a link the browser loads a lot of stuff, including page layout information (HTML & CSS), references to images, and Javascript code, which is like a program to do things. Normally the code communicates with the host platform to get information from databases and pass along things like passwords and emails, but that can be changed to do bad things.
Search engines don’t do that. The contents of the page are downloaded and scanned for text, links, and images, but no code is run. It’s like the difference between looking at directions on a map, and actually following those directions.
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