[HN Gopher] Ollama Web Search
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Ollama Web Search
Author : jmorgan
Score : 137 points
Date : 2025-09-25 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ollama.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ollama.com)
| chungus42 wrote:
| My biggest gripe with small models has been the inability to keep
| it informed with new data. Seems like this at least eases the
| process.
| mchiang wrote:
| I was pleasantly surprised on the model improvements when
| testing this feature.
|
| For smaller models, it can augment it with the latest data by
| fetching it from the web, solving the problem of smaller models
| lacking specific knowledge.
|
| For larger models, it can start functioning as deep research.
| tripplyons wrote:
| Just set up SearXNG locally if you want a free/local web search
| MCP:
| https://gist.github.com/tripplyons/a2f9d8bd553802f9296a7ec3b...
| mchiang wrote:
| I haven't tried SearXNG personally. How does it compare to
| Ollama's web search in terms of the search content returned?
| tripplyons wrote:
| I have no idea how well Ollama's works, but I haven't ran
| into any issues with SearXNG. The alternatives aren't worth
| paying for in any use case I've encountered.
| disiplus wrote:
| That's what i have together with open webui and gpt-oss-120b.
| it works reasonably well. But sometimes the searches are slow.
| tripplyons wrote:
| You can try removing search engines that fail or reducing
| their timeout setting to something faster than the default of
| a few seconds.
| disiplus wrote:
| SearXNG is fast, its mostly the code that triggers the
| searches. Because, my daily is chatgpt, i still did not try
| to tweak it.
| tripplyons wrote:
| 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?
| disiplus wrote:
| It's tools that you can install from open webui
|
| https://openwebui.com/tools
| sorenjan wrote:
| 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.
| mchiang wrote:
| 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
| sorenjan wrote:
| > 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 time.
| mchiang wrote:
| 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.
| typpilol wrote:
| 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.
| oytis wrote:
| 20 a month for a commercial model is price dumping
| financed by investors. For ollama it's hopefully a
| sustainable price.
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
| disiplus wrote:
| hi, to me this sounds like you are going into the direction
| of openrouter.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| For models you can't run locally like gpt-oss-120b, deepseek or
| qwen3-coder 480b. And a way for them to monetize the success of
| Ollama.
| dcreater wrote:
| 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.
| all2 wrote:
| What sort of monetization model would you like to see? What
| model would you deem acceptable?
| dcreater wrote:
| Ollama , the local inference platform, stays completely
| local. Maintained by a non-profit org with dev time
| contributed to by a for-profit company. That company can be
| VC backed and can make their cloud inference platform. And
| can use ollama as its backed, as a platform to market etc.
| But keep it as a separate product (not named ollama).
|
| This is almost exactly how duckdb/motherduck functions and
| I think theyre doing an excellent job.
|
| EDIT: grammar and readability
| troyvit wrote:
| If I were them I'd go whole-hog on local models and:
|
| * Work with somebody like System76 or Framework to create
| great hardware systems come with their ecosystem
| preinstalled.
|
| * Build out a PaaS, perhaps in partnership with an existing
| provider, that makes it easy for anybody to do what Ollama
| search does. I'm more than half certain I could convince
| our cash strapped organization to ditch elastic search for
| that.
|
| * Partner with Home Assistant, get into home automation and
| wipe the floor with Echo and its ilk (yeah basically
| resurrect Mycroft but add whole-house automation to it).
|
| Each of those are half-baked, but it also took me 7 minutes
| to come up with them, and they seem more in line with what
| Ollama tries to represent than a pure cloud play using low-
| power models.
| kergonath wrote:
| As long as the software that runs locally gets maintained
| (and ideally improved, though if it is not I'll simply move
| to something else), I find it difficult to be angry. I am
| more annoyed by software companies that offer a nerfed
| "community edition" whose only purpose is to coerce people
| into buying the commercial version.
| dcreater wrote:
| > 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
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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
| dcreater wrote:
| 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
| kordlessagain wrote:
| 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 run tools on different models.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway12345t wrote:
| Do they pull their own index like brave or are they using
| Bing/Google in the background?
| tripplyons wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway12345t wrote:
| We need more indexes
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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).
| ineedasername wrote:
| Do we know what OpenAI uses? Have they built their own, or
| piggy back on moneybags $MS and Bing?
| tripplyons wrote:
| They use Bing: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehami
| lton/2023/05/23/ch...
| tripplyons wrote:
| 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.
| pzo wrote:
| perplexity added API today, got the following email:
|
| > Dear API user, We're excited to launch the Perplexity
| Search API -- giving developers direct access to the same
| real-time, high-quality web index that powers Perplexity's
| answers.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| mchiang wrote:
| 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.
| kingnothing wrote:
| You can say you're training an AI model and do whatever you
| want with it.
| apimade wrote:
| It is strange to launch this type of functionality with not
| even a privacy policy in place.
|
| It makes me wonder if they've partnered with another of their
| VC's peers who's recently had a cash injection, and they're
| being used as a design partner/customer story.
|
| Exa would be my bet. YC backed them early, and they've also
| just closed a $85M Series B. Bing would be too expensive to run
| freely without Microsoft partnership.
|
| Get on that privacy notice soon, Ollama. You're HQ'd in CA,
| you're definitely subject to CCPA. (You don't need revenue to
| be subject to this, just being a data controller for 50,000
| Californian residents is enough.)
|
| https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
|
| I can imagine the reaction if it turns out the zero-retention
| provider backing them ended up being Alibaba.
| MisterBiggs wrote:
| 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
| jmorgan wrote:
| 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)
| dcreater wrote:
| Their posture has continually been getting worse and worse.
| It's deceptive and I've expunged it from all my systems
| bigyabai wrote:
| > 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.
| disiplus wrote:
| they had at some point start earning money.
| bigyabai wrote:
| 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.
| timothymwiti wrote:
| Does anyone know if the python and JavaScript examples on the
| blog work without an Ollama Account?
| mrkeen wrote:
| 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.
| ineedasername wrote:
| You can use solr, very good full text search and it has an mcp
| integration. That's sufficient on its own and straightforward
| to setup:
|
| https://github.com/mjochum64/mcp-solr-search
|
| A slightly heavier lift, but only slightly, would be to also
| use solr to also store a vectorized version of your docs and
| simultaneously do vector similarity search, solr has built in
| knn support fort it. Pretty good combo to get good quality with
| both semantic and full-text search.
|
| Though I'm not sure if it would be relatively similar work to
| do solr w/ chromadb, for the vector portion, and marry the
| result stewards via llm pixie dust ("you are the helpful
| officiator of a semantic full-text matrimonial ceremony" etc).
| Also not sure the relative strengths of chromadb vs solr on
| that- maybe scales better for larger vector stores?
| all2 wrote:
| docling might be a good way to go here. Or consider one of the
| existing full text search engines like Typesense.
| lxgr wrote:
| Does this work with (tool use capable) models hosted locally?
| yggdrasil_ai wrote:
| I don't think ollama officially supports any proper tool use
| via api.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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?
| all2 wrote:
| It depends on the model. Deepseek-R1 says it supports tool
| use, but the system prompt template does not have the tool-
| include callouts. YMMV
| parthsareen wrote:
| Hi - author of the post. Yes it does! The "build a search
| agent" example can be used with a local model. I'd recommend
| trying qwen3 or gpt-oss
| lxgr wrote:
| Very cool, thank you!
|
| Looking forward to try it with a few shell scripts (via the
| llm-ollama extension for the amazing Python 'llm') or Raycast
| (the lack of web search support for Ollama has been one of my
| biggest reasons for preferring cloud-hosted models).
| parthsareen wrote:
| Since we shipped web search with gpt-oss in the Ollama app
| I've personally been using that a lot more especially for
| research heavy tasks that I can shoot off. Plus with a 5090
| or the new macs it's super fast.
| yggdrasil_ai wrote:
| I wish they would instead focus on local tool use. I could just
| use my own web search via brave api.
| parthsareen wrote:
| 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?
| vrzucchini wrote:
| Hey, unrelated to the question you're answering but where do
| I see the rate limits for free and paid tiers?
| coffeecoders wrote:
| 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?
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Have you ever tried https://marginalia-search.com ? I love it.
| matsz wrote:
| You could take a look at the leaked Yandex source code from a
| few years ago. I'd believe their architecture should be decent
| enough.
| harias wrote:
| YaCy (https://yacy.net) can do all this I think. Cloudflare
| might block you IP pretty soon though if you try to crawl.
| toephu2 wrote:
| With LLMs why do you even need a mini-Google?
| frabonacci wrote:
| 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
| drnick1 wrote:
| What "Ollama account?" I am confused, I thought the point of
| Ollama was to self-host models.
| mchiang wrote:
| To provide additional features or using Ollama's cloud hosted
| models, you can signup for an Ollama account.
|
| For starter, this is completely optional. It can be completely
| local too for you to publish your own models to ollama.com that
| you can share with others.
| dumbmrblah wrote:
| What is the data retention policy for the free account versus the
| cloud account?
| nextworddev wrote:
| Can someone tell me how much this costs and how this compares to
| Tavily etc
| typpilol wrote:
| Taviy gives you 1k free requests a month.
|
| Even with heavy ai usage I'm only at like 400/1000 for the
| month
| anonyonoor wrote:
| I know it might be a security nightmare, but I still want to see
| an implementation of client-side web search.
|
| Like a full search engine that can visit pages on your behalf. Is
| anyone building this?
| not_really wrote:
| sounds like a good way to get your IP flagged by cloudflare
| apimade wrote:
| AgenticSeek, or you can get pretty far with local qwen and
| Playwright-Stealth or SeleniumBase integrated directly into
| your Chrome (running with Chrome DevTools Protocol enabled).
| riskable wrote:
| 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?
| tartoran wrote:
| They'll have to squeeze it all from Youtube!
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| google.com/sorry
| thimabi wrote:
| They can always pivot to their Search-via-API business :)
|
| It takes lots of servers to build a search engine index, and
| there's nothing to indicate that this will change in the near
| future.
| onesociety2022 wrote:
| 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.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| I have a MCP tool that uses SERP API and it works quite well.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| 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.
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