Search-R1, Re-examined: Does the Model Actually Learn to Search and Reason?

We retrained Search-R1 across model sizes, RL algorithms, training distributions, search budgets, and broken-retriever settings — and ablated the scaffolding. The model's QA score barely moves when the think protocol is removed; it collapses when the retriever returns nothing; and the number of searches the model issues has almost nothing to do with the question. RL teaches the model to play the…