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Ollama Web Search

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Re: Ollama Web Search

#121

Post by msephton »

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…

Perhaps not quite solving your problem, but I have a handful of domain-specific Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) that limit the results to predefined websites. I summon them from Alfred with short keywords when I'm doing interest-specific searches. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/20/interest-specific...

Re: Ollama Web Search

#122

Post by jrvarela56 »

userbinator wrote: post #118
simonw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I care about this is that different providers have different rules about how I can use the results. Brave: https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/terms-of-service "Licensee shall not at any time, and shall not permit others to: store the results of the API or any derivative works from the results of the API" Exa: https://exa.ai/assets/Exa_Labs_Terms_of_Service.pdf "You may not [...] download, modify, copy,…

(IANAL) You can normally safely ignore such things.

I agree with you in spirit, but that’s not an answer you can apply when there’s someone else’s money at stake.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#124

Post by bryanhogan »

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…

Reminds me of building a Obsidian vault with all the content in markdown form. There's also plugins to show vault results when doing a Google search, making notes within your vault show up before external websites.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#125

Post by langitbiru »

mchiang wrote: post #119
dcreater wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This information is very useful to the open source community. Whats the rationale in not "building in the public"? Is Ollama turning its back on the open source community? Also why should we believe ollama web search is better than my locally run searxng server?

Oh yes! that is why I want to provide the names of the providers we use. I do believe in building in the open. The web search functionality has a very generous free tier (it is behind Ollama's free account to prevent abuse) that allows you to give it a try comparing to running a searxng server locally. On making the search functionality locally -- we made considerations and gave it a try but had trouble around result…

How much is the generous free tier? I couldn't find it in the website.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#126

Post by mrkeen »

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…

Yep. Built a crawler, an indexer/queryprocessor, and an engine responsible for merging/compacting indexes.

Crawling was tricky. Something like stackoverflow will stop returning pages when it detects that you're crawling, much sooner than you'd expect.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#127

Post by mrheosuper »

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…

If you are on $100 tier Claude, what makes you think the $20 Tier Ollama is enough for you ?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#128

Post by theshrike79 »

kingnothing wrote: post #61
simonw wrote: post #9

I'd love to know what search engine provider they're using under the hood for this. I asked them on Twitter and didn't get a reply (yet) https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1971210260015919488 Crucially, I want to understand the license that applies to the search results. Can I store them, can I re-publish them? Different providers have different rules about this.

You can say you're training an AI model and do whatever you want with it.

The "Zuckerberg defence".

It's OK to pirate a massive amount of books if you're not reading or sharing, but rather just training an AI.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#129

Post by theshrike79 »

oytis wrote: post #66
typpilol wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya a lot of ppl don't realize you could spend 2k on a 5090 to run some of the large models. Or spend 20 a month for models even a 5090 couldn't run. And not have to spend your own electricity, hardware, maintenance, updates etc.

20 a month for a commercial model is price dumping financed by investors. For ollama it's hopefully a sustainable price.

The 20 a month models definitely aren't sustainable.

This is why everyone needs to get every flavour and speedrun building all the tools they need when the infinite money faucets are turned off.

At some point companies will start raising prices or moving towards per-token pricing (Which is sustainable, but expensive).

Re: Ollama Web Search

#130

Post by theshrike79 »

mrheosuper wrote: post #127
kordlessagain wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are on $100 tier Claude, what makes you think the $20 Tier Ollama is enough for you ?

If your workflow is general enough, you can (and should) switch between models. They all have different styles and blind spots.

Like I had Codex + gpt-5-codex (20€ tier) build me a network connectivity monitor for my very specific use case.

It worked, but had some really weird choices. Gave it to Claude Code (20€ tier again) and it immediately found a few issues and simplifications.

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