I Built a $0 Search Engine on Real Web Data (No Algolia or Elasticsearch)

I’ve been reviewing some old RAG code I wrote a year ago and boy has it not aged well. For context: frequently, I’ll need to do what I call a fast “literature” pass. What’s the latest opinion on long context vs. RAG? What’s new for agentic retrieval? Where does hybrid search fit in 2026? I depend heavily on arxiv papers for this. Using a SERP API ( Bright Data ) for Google, running site:arxiv.org plus a well-framed query gets me recent, relevant papers. I’d run four or five of these, collate the