> I do NOT want search to become any fuzzier than it already is.
For a specialized shop site you may want it. Search term: "something 150", the client is looking for a 1.5m something, if you're doing an exact text search your search engine will give you a lot of noise. Or you'll have to fiddle with synonyms, dictionaries and how you index your products with a huge chance to break other types of search queries.
Gemini 2.5 pro is basically free.
Also watsonx, but that's b2b.
And depending on the client vertical they tend to not use the same vocabulary when looking for products.
But contrary to some other comments I know LLM are not magical tools and anything we use will require data to fine tune whatever base model we choose. And it will be used on top of standard text search not as a full replacement. I'm sure many companies are currently doing the exact same thing or will be soon enough.