Simply the best IDE you can work with, I have worked with Scala, Java, PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript in this tool, also has VCS capabilities and data bases exploring tools.
I think Elasticsearch si the best tool for your search engine, it has a lot of features to help you make different types of searches.
Learn it may take some time but it is worth doing it.
React was really easy to learn, you could create your own components and reuse them. State management helps you a lot to componets rerendering. If you combine it with TypeScript you will develop a nice type safe front end application.
