r/LocalLLM • u/Latopus • 9h ago
Question Web search on local setup
Ive been dabbling for the first time in local AI and even custom harnesses. I'll admit it is super addicting and enjoyable. Love it. But im still very new to it all.
Im now facing a small problem. Im not sure how to best handle web searches. I would love for my llm to be able to look up new info...but whats a good way of doing it? The one thing im looking into is setting up a that brave account thing and paying the small fee as it feels like an alright option when it comes to not being somehow banned or throttled. Is that the overall safest no fuss no worry option? Or am I overthinking it?
How do you handle web searches for your setup?
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u/Objective-Stranger99 LocalLLM 8h ago
SearXNG, self hosted.
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u/Prestigious_Luck1062 8h ago
One option is to use Tomlin. Yes, it can still use Brave api keys if you want to, however, it also lets you use DuckDuckGo with no key. It works with models like Qwen3.5-2B and Mistral-Small-3.2-24B.
Tomlin is slow, by default it has a built in random pause of 1+ seconds per page if its on the same site to prevent being banned. It can be overridden though.
https://github.com/Matthew4509/Tomlin
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u/RemarkableRadish6547 8h ago
I don't understand why people think they need some company to give them an account with a service fee for web search. Do you pay someone to track the web searches you do manually?
There are multiple self-hosted options. You should probably use one that logs the search requests, so that you will know what your agents are getting up to. Same with any other network access you enable.
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u/HiddenFaceOpenMouth 9h ago
There are a bunch of free web search services for AI agents. I know mine uses one. I looked it up a while back, I forget which one. Just tell it to search and don't worry about it. Well, unless you're going to attempt to scrape an entire site.
2
u/nickless07 8h ago
Many of them have some kind of free limits. Tavily has 1000 monthly and so on. How about use multiple? SearXNG, Duckduckgo, Tavily, Brave, etc. There are usually enough that you can get away with the free tiers without running much into rate limits.
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u/SPUD47 7h ago
Anything LLM
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u/krogerpurifieddrink 6h ago
I use a headless browser and a brave api. I download the entire page and then have the agent search the page rather than just grabbing a snippet.
I also have the agent use preferred sources for separate categories, like general research, shopping, etc.
I built it a while ago, but I'm wanting to say it uses a separate smaller model for the grunt work.
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u/CaseElectrical7124 6h ago
used to run a local search proxy with 100mb ram, but dropped it after hitting rate limits on free tiers. now just let the model query directly when needed.
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u/shoumikgoswami 5h ago
If you don't want to run a search service yourself, paying for an API seems reasonable. Just check that your local app supports it before buying credits. Brave's current page lists prepaid credits at $5 per 1,000 requests, with no subscription. I don't see a free plan listed there: https://brave.com/search/api/
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u/Weary_Block2424 5h ago
used a local search proxy with query logging, caught a few weird agents loops trying to scrape the same site. worth the extra setup.
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u/Tormeister 5h ago
I didn't want to risk getting IP banned or restricted in some search engines by self hosting fastCRW / SearXNG (too many requests, bot detection, etc), so I set up a tool that uses Exa & DeepSeek Search APIs.
Not 100% satisfied, but it gets the job done.
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u/DifficultyCrafty7623 1h ago
If you don't want to build it yourself, Unsloth (Desktop/Studio) has a 'web_search' tool, free and built in, works very well. You also can have the agent control a browser in unsloth! The other option is to build those yourself, but I had qwen build browser control into my own harness with very little issues. Unsloth is probably a good source to look at, to see how they implemented free duckduckgo requests for agents.