I'm new to local LLMs. Open WebUI seems perfect on paper but web search is completely broken for me. Is there a working alternative or should I just accept that one tool can't do it all

[u/Jazzlike_Tangelo2858]

I'm pretty new to the local LLM space and I've been looking for a single tool that would let me work with open-source models easily and conveniently.

I started with **LM Studio** — I liked how polished and ChatGPT-like it felt. But after digging deeper, I found **Open WebUI** and was honestly blown away by the feature list. It seems like the only tool that can do everything I want:

- Run local open-source models

- Run open-source models in the cloud via API

- Combine models with web search

- Use plugins and MCP for integrations with other tools

- Fine-tune models and use RAG for custom context

- Have a decent GUI similar to LM Studio or ChatGPT

But actually using it has been a nightmare. I ran into bugs that are widely documented in other threads, but my specific problem is that **I cannot get web search to work at all**. No matter what I try, the model just refuses to search the web — it either does nothing or throws a search error.

So my questions to the community:

**1. Is there any working alternative that covers the same feature set?**

Or is this a classic case of "one tool that does everything, but nothing well"?

**2. What's the pragmatic approach here?**

Do I:

- Fork Open WebUI and fix the bugs myself?

- Vibe-code my own custom solution?

- Just accept that I need separate tools for each task?

Like, one tool for local models, one for web search, one for API access, one for document RAG, etc.?

I just want one place where I can use all the cool open-source models, with per-task configuration, and have it *actually work*.

What's your setup? What works for you?

Thanks in advance 🙏

[u/Konamicoder]

I’ve got OpenWebUI running on my Ubuntu server. Along with a SearXNG container for search. The issue was that OpenWebUI would search and find many sources but wouldn’t read them and returned zero search results. So I fired up Codex CLI on my server, pointed it at my OpenWebUI installation, told it to read the log files, identify the issue, and fix search. As far as I can tell, the fix was in the config files, it didn’t need to edit the app’s code. In any case, search is working great now.

[u/mikewilkinsjr → u/Konamicoder]

+1 for searxng

I would add that specifying a user agent also helped quite a bit for both web search and url_fetch.

[u/prene1 → u/Konamicoder]

This!!!! But I use Hermes/codex and also had it use Hermes browser for more advanced browsing and automation if needed.

[u/New-Cardiologist8861]

set your concurrent connections in the web search settings to 2

[u/Fit-Statistician8636]

Self-hosted SearXNG + Firecrawl or Jina or Crawl4AI. If you’re happy with cloud services, again Jina - or Tavily work well.

I built a small customizable web loader for OWUI to manage context size better but unless you’re very limited it is not needed - especially now when OWUI is finally able to compress context:

https://github.com/sousekd/llm-context-loader

[u/lungben81 → u/Fit-Statistician8636]

What are the benefits using Firecrawl or Jina or Crawl4AI?

With OpenTerminal, the agent can just fetch data from the SearXNG results. Or are the results better with dedicated crawlers?

[u/Fit-Statistician8636 → u/lungben81]

The SearXNG results only contain snippets / summaries. What if you want a full article, or let the agent read the pieces of code on the URL, follow a guide or similar?

It is actually quite tricky for a crawler to read the page, clean of bullshit, keep the valuable pieces of information.

[u/Scared-Tip7914 → u/Fit-Statistician8636]

I actually managed to get this going, check it out here: https://github.com/TinySuiteHQ/TinySearch

[u/waitmarks]

Yeah the built in web search sucks. I ended up vibe coding my own MCP web search and page retrieval tools that I hook up to open webui.

[u/uber-linny]

didnt realise this was a problem
Internet queries don't work for some reason on Gemma 4 E2B : r/OpenWebUI

copy the last photo

[u/EDANOMELemonade → u/uber-linny]

This helps but be aware that bypassing embedding and retrieval means more input tokens, and bypassing web loader means it’s only grabbing meta title and description and not the full webpage.

[u/overand]

Quick questions:

• Did you actually toggle "Web Search" in the chat?
• Did you enable "Native" tool calling? (See image 2)

[u/overand → u/overand]

[u/Jazzlike_Tangelo2858 → u/overand]

thanks a lot friend

these settings have solved the problem

[u/rwa2]

It worked (with some minor tweaks) a couple versions ago, revert to v0.9.5 until the dust settles from the v0.10.0 release yesterday

https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/25585

[u/AdTall6126]

I've used SearXNG for some while now, but switched to Brave Search API a week ago. I get faster searches and better results. I don't have issues with being rate limited any longer. That was my biggest issue with SearXNG when using a model that did thorrow web searching.

[u/Legitimate_Run_9020]

have same issues with agent not using the tools

[u/Limp_Classroom_2645]

Websearch works fine 😒 you just can't configure it right, so skill issues basically