The search is for a specific, well defined phenomenon. What happens if they find it will depend on the details of the find, which are currently unknown.
You might get back to the point, which is the question, "What specific phenomenon is ID searching for?"
I'm having a hard time believing SETI's self-selected charter isn't broader than that, and pretty much encapsulated in it's name.
...the SETI Institute's Dr. Jill Tarter recently told Space.com that evidence of extraterrestrial activity might be present in our own solar system. "It's possible that there could be, in fact, within our solar system, some evidence of ET technology," said Dr. Tarter, the woman upon whom Jodie Foster's character in the movie "Contact" was largely based. "They may be here."
If its big goal was a modulated narrow band radio signal, I'd think they'd have called it Narrowband Extra-terrestrial Radio Deep Search.
Interestingly, mainstream SETI astronomers have
made no secret of their searches for "Bracewell
probes," theoretical automatic devices left by
visiting civilizations
Ok, I'll bite. Why is specificity of search a discriminating criteria as to whether something is a science or not? This seems like a puzzling argument to me: I'd have said, at first blush, that more powerful, abstract and generalized claims, are closer to being science than lab tinkering is.