Are methods of exhaustive search considered to be AI? Some programs do exhaustive searches for a solution while others do heuristic searches for a similar answer. For example, in chess, the search for the best next move tends to be more exhaustive in nature whereas, in Go, the search for the best next move tends to be more heuristic in nature due to the much larger search space.

Is the technique of brute force exhaustive searching for a good answer considered to be AI or is it generally required that heuristic algorithms be used before being deemed AI? If so, is the chess-playing computer beating a human professional seen as a meaningful milestone?
If one thinks of intelligence as a continuous measure of optimization power (that is, how much better are outcomes for any unit of cognitive effort expended), then exhaustive search has non-zero intelligence (in that it does actually give better outcomes as more effort is expended) but very, very low intelligence (as the outcomes are better mostly by luck, and the amount of effort expended can be impossibly large).