I hear you - but I had already read through the chain of thought which identified the right region before search, and had already seen the capabilities in many other rounds. It was self-evident to me that the search wasn't an essential part of the model's capabilities by that point.

Which turned out to be true - I re-ran both of those rounds, without search this time, and the model's guesses were nearly identical. I updated the post with those details.

I feel like I did enough to prove that o3's geolocation abilities aren't smoke and mirrors, and I tried to be very transparent about it all too. Do you disagree? What more could I do to show this objectively?