emacs as a pager?

You can use this shell script as your pager:

#!/bin/sh
t=$(tempfile -s .emacs-pager) || exit 1
cat - >> $t
echo 'reading into emacs...'
emacsclient "$t"
rm -f -- $t

Save it as something like ~/bin/emacs_pager.sh, make it executable (eg: chmod +x ~/bin/emacs_pager.sh), and then set it as the value for the PAGER environment variable (eg: export PAGER=~/bin/emacs_pager.sh).

Note: the above shell script came from this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/2rr1ha/use_a_buffer_as_pager_from_shellmode/cnik8wb/

less supports most of the emacs buffer motion key bindings but not the search bindings out of the box. You may be able to use lesskey to customize the key binding to match emacs.