Funnily enough I’ve been looking for a similar utility.
I use jellyfin, and yacy for my local media/documents
Jellyfin isn’t really a search engine, and it may or may not work if you disconnect the drives.
From my experience with shows and movies it does great with metadata and displaying what i have in my collection. However it’s not as good for searching images/videos, as you have to search the exact image/video name (unless it has metadata)
Yacy on the other hand, is much more like a traditional search engine, with an index and all. It’s great for documents (html, md, txt even docx), but doesn’t do well with media files, as it can’t pull metadata, so you have to search all media by title.
I dont think yacy has real time updating, if it does, idk how to enable it.
Both yacy and jellyfin have a way to blacklist things, but they’re just completely different
yacy has a url based blacklist, while jellyfin only displays stuff from folders you tell it to (basically a whitelist)
There was a program that I had stumbled across that was able to index a photos folder using image recognition to generate a description that you could search. I have since forgotten the name of the program but it does exist, and if I find it again I’ll update this comment.
Personally I want something that works like yacy for traditional documents, and can use image recognition for images, but I have yet to find it.
EDIT: I have found the program that does image recognition: sist2I have tried it once before, from experience the sqlite search is a bit janky but works decently enough imo, i haven’t tried the other indexing method.