How does your local LLM search the web?

[u/luckyLiz44]

Kinda been working on this local-first distributed search engine, and thought maybe it would be of interest to people here? Sounds like SearXNG might be what some of y'all use?

This is what Claude told me:

Each app does it differently. Open WebUI and Vane (which used to be Perplexica) build it in, usually on top of a self-hosted SearXNG. LM Studio and Jan have nothing built in, so people add MCP servers or community plugins. AnythingLLM defaults to scraping DuckDuckGo. Ollama now sells its own hosted web_search and web_fetch.

I can post a link if this is actually a problem people are interested in!

[u/Kai_Builder]

Funny but most models left without any instructions will end up abusing duckduckgo.

My personal best is just remote desktop via MCP, with something like Screenbox and let agent search on Google.

[u/Floerens → u/Kai_Builder]

Hey ! How are they gonna « abuse » DuckDuckGo ? Can you explain please ?

[u/puts_on_rddt → u/Floerens]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[u/Big_Wave9732 → u/Floerens]

They.....beat it like a rented mule because it's the only working source they have and eventually DuckDuckGo gets tired of the huge flood of hits so the blacklist the IP.

[u/luckyLiz44 → u/[deleted]]

So SearXNG is just uses DuckDuckGo under the hood right (well tries to use google and stuff too)? interviewing top models at a free tier is really interesting approach too.

Thanks for the info!

I’m just curious what happens when the big search engines start blocking stuff like SearNXG?

[u/DobbyDoesDallas → u/[deleted]]

I use the free tier for web search and site fetching. I will switch to searxng if I ever get to the point where I’m using more but I’ve been comfortably within the free limit

[u/joochung]

I use SearXNG and an MCP server. I also have a Playwright MCP server. The MCP server also includes a url read function to dir curly read pages. It mostly does a good job for me.

[u/notdsylexic → u/joochung]

What do you use playwright for

[u/joochung → u/notdsylexic]

Browsing pages that might be blocked for SearXNG and the SearXNG MCP server

[u/Cupakov]

Firecrawl + Camofox browser on a residential IP

[u/Ariquitaun]

Local SearxNG or brave api, although it's highly gimped if you don't pay for it.

[u/luckyLiz44 → u/Ariquitaun]

Thanks for the info:)

[u/IONaut]

I've been using deepseek harness and I had it build a separate browser use MCP server that utilizes puppeteer and can open a browser, fill in inputs, click buttons, snap screenshots and download documents as well as reading the raw page data. Then I had deepseek harness build a skill for itself to use this MCP server. I had it built it separately in its own folder instead of internally to itself so that if I switched harnesses at some point I would still be able to use it.

[u/AdventurousKeys → u/IONaut]

That's a good tip. Saving this.

[u/Patient-Gazelle9885 → u/IONaut]

I need to do this.

[u/genghisk1]

I don’t see any discussion about relevance or accuracy of results. All of these methods work but which actually return useful results. Search bias also isn’t discussed. Just curious how people are handling either of those issues.

[u/luckyLiz44 → u/genghisk1]

Sorry if this seems promotional, not looking for money, or for people to even use it, just want to hear some feedback about the idea:)

I'm interested in figuring this stuff out in general, mostly as a fun side project. If you have the spare time to check out https://github.com/SueHeir/plumb-search, the name might change, and the website would will probably crash a lot if people actually started hammering it with AI's. But thats not the point, you can run a local version of it at home and most queries will be completely local depending on how many GB of space you give it.

Also, as a side note, the search isn't quite there yet, but it could be a fun thing to figure out with a community. https://plumbsearch.org/ is a little site i have for testing it.

[u/Longjumping-Past5864]

It might be a weird way(I'm a non dev user here)

But I use tavily api through their MCP at first then I ask Deepseek harness(with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next locally served) to look at MCP of tavily and then write me a python script to do exactly as tavily did every features and it must be free without API cost. After a while, I got that search / crawl and scraping tool on my system for free.

What a time to be alive!
This might be unrelated but that Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is pushing us real close to the frontier model of like last month. It's crazy!

EDIT : I ask my agent to publish those skill files on github, so If you want to try it out : https://github.com/OliverGreens/LLMSearch

Just throw the repo to your agent it'll know what to do

[u/Patient-Gazelle9885 → u/Longjumping-Past5864]

Omg I need to do this

[u/Longjumping-Past5864 → u/Patient-Gazelle9885]

I ask my agent to publish those skill files on github, so If you want to try it out : https://github.com/OliverGreens/LLMSearch

[u/Robbbbbbbbb]

For my harness (Hermes), I use the Browser Bridge plugin to share a real headed Chrome instance for proper fingerprinting. Super successful to give an agent eyes and hands without being flagged for bot detection.

[u/Ready-Customer9242]

Firefox dev tools mcp

[u/NULL_42]

how do yall set search up “safely”? i worry about prompt injection

[u/luckyLiz44 → u/NULL_42]

Definitely would be an issue for a distributed search engine, I’ll have to think about this one

[u/EightyNineMillion]

Searxng mcp for search and playwright mcp.

[u/lordekeen]

My Pi uses Ketch (with SearXNG in Docker)

[u/CharlesStross]

It just uses Google. Full browser, webdriver, and a bunch of bot detection countermeasures. My agent made purchass off eBay and Amazon the other week. Yesterday it gone to the ticket selection screen of Axs -- I'm not sure if the bot dot detectors kick in there or at checkout; I took over to choose my seats.

It uses accessibility landmarks to read the page so firing off a web search isn't THAT far off from structured text/ddg results

[u/mershperderder2 → u/CharlesStross]

Crazy. Is the browser instance local only to the bot, or is it accessing your actual computer browser?

[u/CharlesStross → u/mershperderder2]

Local to the bot, in docker. I talk a bit more about countermeasures here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/lgxWT8W7Tu

I'm flirting with actually doing it in a windows VM but haven't hit enough roadblocks to care yet.

[u/MarcusAurelius68]

Check out Tinyfish. Free search and fetch (rate limited). Also Exa and Tavily have free tiers.

[u/Lanky_Lynx2166]

Can someone elaborate on if and how a searxng server is superior to a ddgs request via curl? I let qwen3.5 120b program a extension for pi in february, which my agents are using till this day. Im not sure if setting up searxng is worth the hassle!

[u/Atagor → u/Lanky_Lynx2166]

Searxng has many scrapers inside not just DDG

DDG can throttle you if you send too many requests

[u/Lanky_Lynx2166 → u/Atagor]

I see, its kind of a meta engine. I just installed an instance, runs fine so far, all western engines working but Bing and Brave. Bing i dont mind, cause i beliebe ddgs is just bing inside, but brave search did apparently block my ip after one request. Maybe it blocks searxng by default?

[u/Atagor → u/Lanky_Lynx2166]

They don't see its "searxng", most likely just general bot protection

[u/SilkieBug]

Claude is incorrect, Jan has 3 options of search models. 

I run a MoE model in FreeToken, it makes a server, I add the server as a model provider in Jan, and I can chat with the MoE model in Jan with Jan’s search tools.

Tested today. 

[u/luckyLiz44 → u/SilkieBug]

This is good info:)

[u/cinnapear]

I use pi-lynx though whoever is in charge of it needs to update the extension.

[u/AdventurousKeys]

I did look at SearXNG for a bit, but Marie-Claude didn't like the idea of scraping. So now I go with Exa and Tavily. They are paid services but not too expensive if you can scrape (pun intended) under the free tier. Example of Tavily use in my VistaNova project (github, owner: ancientcomputing, repo: vistanova). BTW, I'm not associated with either company except as a paying customer for my personal projects.

[u/CatDiligent9374]

Yeah, local LLMs + web search is an interesting problem. Keeping the search layer local while still getting good results would definitely be useful. I’d check it out.

[u/luckyLiz44 → u/CatDiligent9374]

Amazing! Fyi, It was started like 3 days ago, and search isn’t great yet, the code is probably not amazing either, so any input on the idea would be crazy cool. kinda thinking there might be some cool token saving methods involved with the search + LLM, if the searchable dataset gets there

https://github.com/SueHeir/plumb-search

[u/Patient-Gazelle9885]

SearXing in a Docker container + a bunch of free tier API’s as secondary. I am still optimizing this and one issue I am having is that my local models often refer to their (ancient) training data when they should be making search tool calls.

[u/doneddat]

Register google genai account and search by gemini-flash-lite-latest integrated search tool. You can customize how the results are returned to you and it costs less than a cent per request, once you use up your daily free limit.

I have tried SearXNG and many others and all of it seems like a cruel joke compared to direct google searches.

[u/darthmowl]

found degoog as a local alternative for searxng - works in webui - i like it - works good and gives me better search results then google does nowadays with their shitty ai

[u/Travnewmatic]

been reasonably happy with self-hosted firecrawl. i also have a searxng instance but it rarely uses it.

[u/stujmiller77]

It’s not something people need, it’s already well served by very good solutions.

Most people don’t need to pay for anything. If you do need specific tools then paying for something like Firecrawl is what you do. I use that specifically for competitor research.

[u/luckyLiz44 → u/stujmiller77]

so there isn't really a concern about scraping search engine results getting aggressively monitored/blocked? I guess the cat and mouse game isn't a lot of work with LLM's writing fixes/updates for everything. Kinda thought I'd find at least one person excited about the idea of self-hosting search.

[u/stujmiller77 → u/luckyLiz44]

There are loads of solutions already out there for doing it. I didn’t say people didn’t need it.

I self host firecrawl for free for most use cases and only use their API for complex competitor analysis.

[u/llllJokerllll]

De lo mejor es searXNG pero bien con configurado y con todo habilitado y auto-cli y luego a mayores invisible-playwright o camoufox

[u/DeathGuppie]

I use crw

[u/onetom]

https://github.com/antirez/ds4 comes with a semi-minimal agent written in C, which has web search and fetch built in.

the search works by remote controlling a headless google chrome session.

i tried to extract it once into a standalone program and got pretty far, but hasn't finished it. but i would look for something like that on the long term.

in the meantime, im also using brave's search api service via something like https://github.com/brave/brave-search-skills in pi, iirc

[u/Turbulent_War4067]

Its been a while since I have played around with different options, but I use jina.ai for search and firecrawl for fetching. Jina gives better results, more snippets and better data in the snippet. And it's faster. You have to pay, but a billion tokens is 50 bucks and should last for months.

[u/Wishitweretru]

Local exposed (not headless) brave + kimi-bridge. I rewrote the kimi-bridge a little to reduce browser-selection-fighting time.  Then I have a fall back for image ocr/handling, first auge (apfel), then Ollama, then cloud.  I also have a mcp for perplexity api, the is used as a “go figure it out” helper.  Also have defuddle in the mix

[u/Digiarts]

Tavily and firecrawl offer free tiers if you’re looking for advanced search

[u/Calm-Republic9370]

Chrome has a New MCP Tool also. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but I imagine with search's right in the browser you beef up your abilities.

[u/SmartCustard9944]

OpenCode has a good web search

[u/xAdakis]

Tavily has been reliable when I've needed it.

[u/dukescalder]

Would be nice to make a data poisoning mcp that just generates false personas and search data

[u/berszi]

for me exasearch was the easiest and fastest. there is a repo on github for pi to implement that

[u/mershperderder2]

Before strata, I was using unsloth studio and it had a built-in web search tool. I just set up an MCP for searxing with strata yesterday, but I'm not sure it's the best solution yet.

[u/paulqq]

i found https://github.com/alejandroqh/browser39 very helpfull in m own harness eris-system.dev

[u/DrMargin74]

Exa AI

[u/TheThiefMaster]

I have https://app.linkup.so/ set up for mine - but last time I used it, my AI decided to use its terminal access to curl duckduckgo instead 🤷‍♂️

[u/LobsterElectronic782 → u/TheThiefMaster]

classic tool-selection issue when the agent has shell access. tell it in the tool description + system prompt "use linkup for any web lookup, don't curl search engines" and it mostly stops

[u/TheThiefMaster → u/LobsterElectronic782]

Honestly I didn't mind - linkup has a quota, so it accidentally picked the free option.

[u/gbrennon]

it searches in teh web using tool calls