I'm shopping for a better search engine.

Any suggestions?

I don't believe there is just one answer to that, because it really depends on your needs, existing stack, and skillset.

Disclaimer aside, I've heard very positive things about the search that ships with PostgreSQL, and similarly positive things for the few search extensions one can add (assuming extensions are available where you're running PG)

https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy#features seems to be a good starting place if you want to embed search, and its https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit friend comes up a lot, but be sure to bear its AGPL license in mind

Toshi is one of the ones which is striving for ES compatibility at the search level, making it a drop-in replacement https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi#example-queries although last time I played with it, they were QUITE A WAYS away, depending on how deep one is in the ES query DSL

And then just last week <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41797041> we were blessed with Nixiesearch <https://github.com/nixiesearch/nixiesearch> which is a pretty specialized engine but will almost certainly be less resource intensive than Elastic (or it's FOSS friend OpenSearch)

Browsing https://github.com/topics/search-engine I was reminded about a bunch that I either haven't tried or I tried so long ago I don't recall their pro/con lists

https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch

https://github.com/typesense/typesense

https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant

https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic

https://github.com/manticoresoftware/manticoresearch