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Ollama Web Search

ollama.com

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Re: Ollama Web Search

#81
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.

a lot of "local" models are still very large to download and slow to run on regular hardware. I think it's great to have a way to evaluate them cheaply in the cloud before deciding to pull down the model to run locally.

At some level it's also more of a principle that I could run something locally that matters rather than actually doing it. I don't want to become dependent on technology that someone could take away from me.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#82

WTF is going to happen to Google's ad revenue if every PC has an AI that can perform searches on the user's behalf?

How is that any different than someone installing an ad blocker in their browser? Arguably ad blocker is much simpler technology than running a local LLM and has been available for years now. And yet Google’s ad revenue seems to have remained unaffected.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> software companies that offer a nerfed "community edition" whose only purpose is to coerce people into buying the commercial version. This is the play. Its only a matter of time till they do it. Investors will want their returns

pardon me but is Ollama a company though? I didn't knew that actually. And are they VC funded? Are they funded by Y-combinator or anything else.. I just thought it was a project by someone to write something similar to docker but for LLM's and that was its pitch for a really really long time I think

Yup thats exactly what I thought as well. I also found out late and to much surprise that its a VC backed startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ollama

Re: Ollama Web Search

#85

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 GUI is closed-source. If someone wants an easy to use & easy to setup app, may as well use LMStudio, which doesn't try to pretend to be OSS. Or use ramalama which is basically just containerizing LLMs and the relevant bits, pretty damn similar to ollama. Or just go back to "basics" and use llama.cpp or vllm.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#86

WTF is going to happen to Google's ad revenue if every PC has an AI that can perform searches on the user's behalf?

There are millions of websites, and a local LLM cannot scrape all of them to make sense of them. Think about it. OpenAI can do it because they spend millions to train its systems.

Many sites have hidden sitemaps that cannot be found unless submitted to google directly. (Not even listed in robots txt most of the time). There is no way a local LLM can keep up with up to date internet.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#87

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.

They are former Docker employees running Docker playbook.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#88
I am just working on a tool using websearch and iterating over different providers.

openAI, xAI, gemini all suffer from not being allowed on respective competitor sites.

this searched works for me with some quick tests well on YT videos, which OpenAI web search can't access. It kind of failed on X but sometimes returned ok relevant results. Definitely hit and miss but on average good

Re: Ollama Web Search

#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 first few Google results into GPT, followed by my question" gave me very good results most of the time.

It of course also works with Ollama, but I don't have a very good GPU, so it gets really slow for me on long contexts.

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