I've liked qwen and embeddinggemma for local search. Qwen because 32K is enough to basically fit a whole page into the context window and embeddiggemma because it's crazy efficient.

Benchmarks only paint part of the picture, but it's still a decent place to start looking into recent models:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard

embeddings are easy to fine tune. Try modern bert.