I don’t know about OCR, but you don’t need to worry about search. I am using a MacBook Pro that is over five years old, and just for the hell of it I have just run a search of three open databases. The result of the search is shown in the image herewith:
Just one of these databases is about 5.5 GB in size and contains nearly 19 million words.
I think your M1 should cope …