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Ollama Web Search

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Re: Ollama Web Search

#31

Post by disiplus »

mchiang wrote: post #10
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.

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

hi, to me this sounds like you are going into the direction of openrouter.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#33

Post by dcreater »

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.

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.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#34

Post by lxgr »

yggdrasil_ai wrote: post #30
lxgr wrote: post #29

Does this work with (tool use capable) models hosted locally?

I don't think ollama officially supports any proper tool use via api.

Huh, I was pretty sure I used it before, but maybe I’m confusing it with some other python-llm backend.

Is https://ollama.com/blog/tool-support not it?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#35

Post by dcreater »

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

Their posture has continually been getting worse and worse. It's deceptive and I've expunged it from all my systems

Re: Ollama Web Search

#36

Post by JumpCrisscross »

throwaway12345t wrote: post #28
tripplyons wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> We need more indexes

Not particularly. Indexes are sort of like railroads. They're costly to build and maintain. They have significant external costs. (For railroads, in land use. For indexes, in crawler pressure on hosting costs.)

If you build an index, you should be entitled to a return on your investment. But you should also be required to share that investment with others (at a cost to them, of course).

Re: Ollama Web Search

#37

Post by parthsareen »

yggdrasil_ai wrote: post #32

I wish they would instead focus on local tool use. I could just use my own web search via brave api.

Hey! Author of the blogpost and I also work on Ollama's tool calling. There has been a big push on tool calling over the last year to improve the parsing. What's the issues you're running into with local tool use? What models are you using?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#38

Post by coffeecoders »

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 create an inverted index for fast keyword search. Could use something like Whoosh.

- Storage: Store raw HTML and text locally, maybe compress older snapshots.

- Search Layer: Simple query parser to score results by relevance, maybe using TF-IDF or embeddings.

I would do periodic updates and build a small web UI to browse.

Anyone tried it or are there similar projects?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#40

Post by frabonacci »

This is a nice first step - web search makes sense, and it’s easy to imagine other tools being added next: filesystem, browser, maybe even full desktop control. Could turn Ollama into more than just a model runner. Curious if they’ll open up a broader tool API for third-party stuff too
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