As a stopgap - desktop search engine?
Excellent article - thanks for that.
I have a ton of research papers going back 30+ years as PDFs, and years ago, I started using Copernic desktop search engine. It's still going - the IP has changed hands and the company seems a bit scummy these days, and their product doesn't really do anything new or better than it did 15 years ago, but I still use v6 on a daily basis.
Google did something similar, and possibly better, but then lost interest, as Google is wont to do. Desktop search engines seemed to have a brief vogue, before everything went Cloud-y, but I still use Copernic to have a fast, local, searchable index of all my files on all my local hard drives and NAS.
What WAS that paper with the neurons in flies where they used tdTomato and laser axotomy? "drosophila tdtomato axotomy" [limit filetype to PDF] will give me the hit in a few seconds.
(Yes, I know Microsoft will index your filesystem, but it's shit. It doesn't index INSIDE files, as far as I am aware, and Christ, it's slow...)
Doesn't work so well for images, unless you name your image files well (and I confess I lack the discipline to do this properly), but it indexes ALL my emails, Word docs, PDFs, textfiles and more, and gives me very fast hits. The index on my SSD is 3.5Gb in size, and Copernic took about 3seconds to find the image files from when I saw "Shonen Knife" back in 2017.