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Ollama Web Search

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Re: Ollama Web Search

#91

Post by Cheer2171 »

dcreater wrote: post #33
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.

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.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#92

Post by andai »

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…

Have you ever looked at Common Crawl dumps? I did a bit of data mining and holy cow is 99.99% of the web crap. Spam, porn, ads, flame wars, random blogs by angsty teens... I understand it has historical and cultural value — and maybe literary value, in a Douglas Coupland kind of way — but for my purposes, there was very little here that I considered of interest.

Which was very encouraging to me, because it implies that indexing the Actually Important Web Pages might even be possible for a single person on their laptop.

Wikipedia, for comparison, is only ~20GB compressed. (And even most of that is not relevant to my interests, e.g. the Wikipedia articles related to stuff I'd ever ask about are probably ~200MB tops.)

Re: Ollama Web Search

#93

Post by andai »

toephu2 wrote: post #74
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…

With LLMs why do you even need a mini-Google?

For my LLM to use! I want sources, excerpts, cross-referencing...

Re: Ollama Web Search

#94

Post by simonw »

mchiang wrote: post #58
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.

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?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#95

Post by andai »

tripplyons wrote: post #49
throwaway12345t wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more indexes

More competition in the space would be great for me as a consumer, but the problem is that the high fixed costs make starting an index difficult.

I've been wondering can't this be done p2p? Didn't we solve most of the technical problems in the late 90s / early 2000s? And then just abandoned that entire way of thinking for some reason?

If many thousands of people care about having a free / private / distributed search engine, wouldn't it make sense for them to donate 1% of their CPU/storage/network to an indexer / db that they they then all benefit from?

Re: Ollama Web Search

#96

Post by Cheer2171 »

all2 wrote: post #43
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 sort of monetization model would you like to see? What model would you deem acceptable?

Have ollama server support auth / API keys (closed as out of scope) and monetize the way everyone else does around SSO.

Re: Ollama Web Search

#97

Post by Cheer2171 »

Your regular reminder that you don't need ollama to get a quick chat engine on the command line, you can just do this with pretty much any major model on huggingface:

pip install transformers

transformers chat Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct

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