Is it? I was just skimming the article and looking at the implementation details and it really just looks like giving a spatial dimension (a 2D grid in this case) to various graph search/traversal algorithms. In the case of this article it implies to me they were specifically looking at Dijkstra's algorithm for graph search on a grid given the name. The examples hit most the populat graph searches I'm aware of.

I may have missed it in the article but I didn't see anything about trying localized search, everything seemed to use global context to find fairly optimal routes across the grid (graph) surface. Again, I did just skim so pardon me if I missed the interesting nugget.