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Ollama Web Search

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Re: Ollama Web Search

#21

Post by jmorgan »

MisterBiggs wrote: post #14

I was hoping for more details about their implementation, I saw ollama as the open source // platform agnostic tool but I worry their recent posturing is going against that

We did consider building functionality into Ollama that would go fetch search results and website contents using a headless browser or similar. However we had a lot of worries about result quality and also IP blocking from Ollama creating crawler-like behavior. Having a hosted API felt like a fast path to get results into users' context window, but we are still exploring the local option. Ideally you'd be able to stay fully local if you want to (even when using capabilities like search)

Re: Ollama Web Search

#22

Post by tripplyons »

disiplus wrote: post #17
tripplyons wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try removing search engines that fail or reducing their timeout setting to something faster than the default of a few seconds.

SearXNG is fast, its mostly the code that triggers the searches. Because, my daily is chatgpt, i still did not try to tweak it.

I haven't needed to tweak mine for similar reasons, but I'm surprised to hear that the "code that triggers the searches" is slow. Are you referring to something in Open WebUI?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#23

Post by bigyabai »

disiplus wrote: post #18
bigyabai wrote: post #15

> Create an API key from your Ollama account. Dead on arrival. Thanks for playing, Ollama, but you've already done the leg work in obsoleting yourself.

they had at some point start earning money.

At some point you have to earn user trust. If Ollama won't be the Open Source Ollama API provider, there are several endpoint-compatible alternatives happy to replace them.

From where I'm standing, there's not enough money in B2C GPU hosting to make this sort of thing worthwhile. Features like paid search APIs this really hammer home how difficult it is to provide value around that proposition.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#24

Post by mchiang »

sorenjan wrote: post #20
mchiang wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair question. Some of the supported models are large and wouldn't fit on most local devices. This is just the beginning, and Ollama does not need to exclude cloud hosted frontier models either with the relationship we've built with the model providers. We just have to be mindful and understand that Ollama stands with developers, and solve the needs. https://ollama.com/cloud

> Some of the supported models are large and wouldn't fit on most local devices. Why would I use those models on your cloud instead of using Google's or Anthropic's models? I'm glad there are open models available and that they get better and better, but if I'm paying money to use a cloud API I might as well use the best commercial models, I think they will remain much better than the open alternatives for quite some…

When we started Ollama, we were told how open-source (open-weight wasn't a term back then) will always be inferior to the close-sourced models. This was 2 years ago (Ollama's birthday is July 18th, 2023).

Fast forward to now, open models are quickly catching up, and at a significantly lower price point for most and can be customized for specific tasks instead of being general purpose. For general purpose models, absolutely the closed models are currently dominating.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#25

Post by mrkeen »

Any tips on local/enterprise search?

I like using ollama locally and I also index and query locally.

I would love to know how to hook ollama up to a traditional full-text-search system rather than learning how to 'fine tune' or convert my documents into embeddings or whatnot.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#26

Post by disiplus »

tripplyons wrote: post #22
disiplus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SearXNG is fast, its mostly the code that triggers the searches. Because, my daily is chatgpt, i still did not try to tweak it.

I haven't needed to tweak mine for similar reasons, but I'm surprised to hear that the "code that triggers the searches" is slow. Are you referring to something in Open WebUI?

It's tools that you can install from open webui

https://openwebui.com/tools

Re: Ollama Web Search

#27

Post by ineedasername »

sorenjan wrote: post #20
mchiang wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair question. Some of the supported models are large and wouldn't fit on most local devices. This is just the beginning, and Ollama does not need to exclude cloud hosted frontier models either with the relationship we've built with the model providers. We just have to be mindful and understand that Ollama stands with developers, and solve the needs. https://ollama.com/cloud

> Some of the supported models are large and wouldn't fit on most local devices. Why would I use those models on your cloud instead of using Google's or Anthropic's models? I'm glad there are open models available and that they get better and better, but if I'm paying money to use a cloud API I might as well use the best commercial models, I think they will remain much better than the open alternatives for quite some…

A person can use Google’s Gemma models on ollama’s cloud and possibly pay less. And have more quality control that way (and other types of control I guess) since there is no don’t need to wonder if a recent model update or load balance throttling impacted results. Your use case doesn’t generalize.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#28

Post by throwaway12345t »

tripplyons wrote: post #19
throwaway12345t wrote: post #8

Do they pull their own index like brave or are they using Bing/Google in the background?

Based on the fact that there are very few up-to-date English-language search indexes (Google, Bing, and Brave if you count it), it must be incredibly costly. I doubt they are maintaining their own.

We need more indexes
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