Instead of reaching for some fancy SAAS, if you just want a basic search complete with the power of vectors, then look no further than SQLite.
SQLite comes with some off the shelf extensions, plus some plug and play ones that make building a hybrid search engine really easy.
I'm going to walk you through building one such engine. We'll be using some food recipes as our test data and by the end of it we'll be able to handle lexical queries like quesadillas as well as semantic queries like grandma's comfort food or spicy south asian dish and using a blending algorithm to mix lexical and semantic search results.
How people engage with technology has obviously fundamentally changed in the last decade or more. We have moved from a somewhat decentralised internet of blogs and microsites to a small, consolidated network of communication mediums owned by megacorporations.
The upside of this is a new extremely efficient means of consumption - just log on and scroll. The downside has been a loss of autonomy, the consumer as the product, and probably massive spikes in mental health issues. As we become passive consumers of content, algorithmically placated, it's easy to lose the sense of empowerment that was afforded to us by computers and the internet.
The solution is simple - curate your own feeds, delete the apps and escape the algorithm.