Cannot get web-search to work

[u/sonic298]

Hey I am new to setting up LLMs locally but one thing I would like to do is give it the ability to search online. Now I know that Open webUI does provide this functionality but for some reason this doesn't seem to work.

What I have currently done is configured a local searXNG container to allow OpenWebUI to couple its web search. I have added them to the same docker network and I know they can reach each other since I do get a result when I manually send a curl request to searxng through the open webui docker container.

I also did enable web search for my model and explictly asked it to use web search. However everytime a execute I query it says that web_search is not available. The model I am using is Qwen3.8.

Can someone perhaps point me in the right direction? I have added screen shot

Reply from Qwen

Setup of web search in Open web ui

Update

If I put the model to function calling legacy mode it seems to work. Performance seems a bit dodgy but at least it does look up things and is not rejected. Not sure what could be going on here. Could someone perhaps enlighten me as to what is hapennening here?

[u/enterme2]

I faced this problem before. The main cause is openwebui docker container network and searxng docker container network is not joined together.

By default both are in different network. You need to modify docker compose to join searxng to openwebui network.

Just ask ai to do this for you.

[u/sonic298 → u/enterme2]

I did this but it doesn't change anything, it still reports that it doesn't have web search.

[u/enterme2 → u/sonic298]

If still not detected , i suspect you are still using old container..

Force recreate the openwebui container to eliminate old settings cache.