Weaviate is pretty cool IMO. It is open source and fairly easy* to get this running locally and do stuff with it. Definitely worth playing with. In the past I have done a search-type thing for a side project and used Elastic Search. While I think ES is great, it might be overkill and something like this might be easier to manage.
You can even run Weaviate as an embedded python package rather than a separate process, so compare that to running an ES cluster and I think life gets a lot easier. Although you are probably working 'closer to the metal' but really if you use ES you will be tuning the hell out of it anyway.
* depends on your experience, but if you can use docker, and know roughly what an embedding basically is a concept, then not too hard to get something up and running.
You can even run Weaviate as an embedded python package rather than a separate process, so compare that to running an ES cluster and I think life gets a lot easier. Although you are probably working 'closer to the metal' but really if you use ES you will be tuning the hell out of it anyway.
* depends on your experience, but if you can use docker, and know roughly what an embedding basically is a concept, then not too hard to get something up and running.