They are different if we do not have powerful search utilities. But when we have good search tools both searching and browsing will benefit from it. Look at the WWW search engines (google, yahoo, ...). Almost all of them have web site directories, which are for browsing but benefit a lot from the search technologies.

If we have good logical categories for the ports, and have good indexing and searching tools, it does not matter where the ports are physically put. And surely a better interface for browsing can be built on top of that.