I'm not a fan of Python, but the bigger "issue" here if this was meant to be production code (it's clearly not) is not the choice of Python, but algorithm choic

I'm not a fan of Python, but the bigger "issue" here if this was meant to be production code (it's clearly not) is not the choice of Python, but algorithm choices. It shows the principles, but for a production search engine there are a whole lot of tricks you'd apply whether you stick with Python or not. And once you do, odds are you'd find most of the runtime spent in very small portions of code doing fairly basic composable operations on large compressed arrays, and you can get very far with just rewriting a tiny core in something faster. The number of people who need a scale where this is hard to do fast enough is small...