Next Steps in Athena Based Project

Without knowing the full details of your use-case it is hard to recommend a solution.

In general Athena is used for Big Data Analytics use cases, for running queries on a data lake.

In your use-case, if you want to support fuzzy text-based search, then using Amazon OpenSearch may be a better option for the peoples database that users will search. To record the search history, you could use DynamoDB or RDS/Aurora MySQL or Postgres database. If you use DynamoDB, you could have the user that did the search as the partition key and the current datatime as the sort key. You could create other fields based on what information you want to capture.

Assuming you are planning to build a GUI application, you could create APIs in Lambda or ECS/EKS that will implement the backend functionality. The front-end could be integrated with Amazon Cognito and you can pass JWT tokens from Cognito to the backend APIs so they can determine who the user doing the search is and accordingly log them into your database.

Just throwing out some ideas without knowing a whole lot of details.