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Ollama Web Search

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Re: Ollama Web Search

#101

Post by dcreater »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #91
dcreater wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's been a steady pivot to profitable features. Wonderful to see them build a reputation through FOSS and codebase from free labor to then cash in.

What reputation? People who actually know how to develop software or work with LLMs know ollama is a child's tricycle and to run the hell away from what is just a buggy shell around other people's inference engines. Ollama is beloved by people who know how to write 5 lines of python and bash to do API calls, but can't possibly improve the actual app.

Thats what I thought so as well - that it was for people like me who arent professional SWEs and thus im sad to see them go this way. But what ive found is people are using it for "on-prem" style deployment, have no idea if this is common but I wouldnt be surprised given the reality of AI startups + the abundance of ollama in training dataset leading to relatively greater vibe coding success rate

Re: Ollama Web Search

#102

Post by cristoperb »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #98
coolspot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are former Docker employees running Docker playbook.

[flagged]

Ollama is a ycombinator startup, so I guess they have to find some roi at some point.[1]

I personally found Ollama to be an easy way to try out local LLMs and appreciate them for that (and I still use it to download small models on my laptop and phone (via termux)), but I've long switched to llama.cpp + llama-swap[2] on my dev desktop. I download whatever ggufs I want from hugging face and just do `git pull` and `cmake --build build --config Release` from my llama.cpp directory whenever I want to update.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ollama 2: https://github.com/mostlygeek/llama-swap

Re: Ollama Web Search

#103

Post by n4bz0r »

kordlessagain wrote: post #77
sorenjan wrote: post #7

I had no idea they had their own cloud offering, I thought the whole point of Ollama was local models? Why would I pay $20/month to use small inferior models instead of using one of the usual AI companies like OpenAI or even Mistral? I'm not going to make an account to use models on my own computer.

You make an account to use their hosted models AND to have them available via the Ollama API LOCALLY. I'm spending $100 on Claude and $200 on GPT5, so $20 bucks is NOTHING and totally worth having access to: Qwen3 235b Deepseek 3.1 671b (thinking and non thinking) Llama 3.1 405b GPT OSS 120b Those are hardly "small inferior models". What is really cool is that you can set Codex up to use Ollama's API and then have it…

Has anyone tried the hosted models? How do they compare to GPT-5?

I was thinking about trying ChatGPT Pro, but I seem to have completely missed that they bumped the price from $100 to $200. It was $100 just a while ago, right? Before GPT-5, I assume.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#105

Post by mchiang »

simonw wrote: post #94
mchiang wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We work with search providers and ensure that we have zero data retention policies in place. The search results are yours to own and use. You are free to do what you want with it. Of course you are bound by local laws of the legal jurisdiction you are in.

OK, so it looks like you aren't willing to share which providers you are working with. Can you share the rationale for not sharing that information instead?

We have relationships with many providers and I don't want to be seen as promoting or not promoting a specific provider. Some decent privacy-preserving vendors - Brave, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, DuckDuckGo etc

We will continue to monitor what's good to improve the output quality and results. Sometimes it could be the combination of providers to yield even better results. If I say one combination right now, and realize another combination is better, and make changes, I wouldn't need to broadcast it each time or risk misrepresenting the feature, which is to have amazing search and research capabilities that can augment models for a superior output.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#106

Post by ivape »

andai wrote: post #90

I added search to my LLMs years ago with the python DuckDuckGo package. However I found that Google gives better results, so I switched to that. (I forget exactly but I had to set up something in a Google dev console for that.) I think the DDG one is unofficial, and the Google one has limits (so it probably wouldn't work well for deep research type stuff). I mostly just pipe it into LLM apis. I found that "shove the…

How do you meaningfully use it without using scraping APIs? Aren't the official apis severely limited?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#107

Post by mchiang »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #104

I'm looking to use web search in production, but they haven't mentioned the price. Only thing that's mentioned is $20/month, but how much quota does it include?

Sorry about this. We are working really hard on providing a usage based pricing.

During the preview period we want to start offering a $20 / month plan tailored for individuals - and we are monitoring the usage and making changes as people hit rate limits so we can satisfy most use cases, and be generous.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#108

Post by computerex »

coffeecoders wrote: post #38

On a slightly related note- I've been thinking about building a home-local "mini-Google" that indexes maybe 1,000 websites. In practice, I rarely need more than a handful of sites for my searches, so it seems like overkill to rely on full-scale search engines for my use case. My rough idea for architecture: - Crawler: A lightweight scraper that visits each site periodically. - Indexer: Convert pages into text and cre…

Kind of. I made ainews247.org that crawls certain sites and filters content so it's AI specific and valuable. I think it's a really good idea.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#110

Post by blihp »

andrewmutz wrote: post #84

Ollama is a business? They raised money? I thought it was just a useful open source product. I wonder how they plan to monetize their users. Doesn't sound promising.

There are very few recently launched pure open source projects these days (most are at least running donation-ware models or funded by corporate backers), none in the AI space that I'm aware of.
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