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.

embeddings are easy to fine tune. Try modern bert.

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