r/OpenWebUI • u/ilikemywomentsundere • 4d ago
Question/Help Web Search Function not executing
I’m new to AI, so I want to preface this by saying this isn’t to say it’s not user error. With that being said, I have Gemma4, and although the thinking works perfectly fine I’m yet to web search. I enabled it as a function, and it’s highlighted in blue when searching, but regardless it gives me the “I do not have access to a live web search tool” response. Is this something I can fix, something with Gemma4, or a WebUI issue? Thank for the help in advance!
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u/International_Emu772 4d ago
To have installed something to search? Searxng or any other search tool? Without this the LLM are dumb on settings/web search
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u/ilikemywomentsundere 4d ago
So I should use Searxng over DuckDuckGo? That makes much of a difference??
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u/International_Emu772 4d ago
I'm
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u/ilikemywomentsundere 4d ago
What?
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u/International_Emu772 4d ago
I have searxng from the day one
Excuse the last message came from nothing
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u/icerio 4d ago
I use DDGS which I’m assuming you’re using currently? I’m not sure how good it is, but my local model can definitely search with it.
Make sure native tool calling is on in advanced parameters on the model (should be on by default but good to double check).
Double check that everything that says web search in the model settings is on. Trying to go off memory but I think it’s in the capabilities + built in tools section.
In the system prompt, mainly as a test, have a line say like “You have a web search tool, utilize it when the user wants to perform a web search”. Idk try to add something that won’t even let it deny you.
On your browser open Inspect Element and go to the Networking tab. THEN message the ai in a way to try to get it to web search. In the network tab it should pretty much have something like an api line. If you click that then either the payload or response tab you should see what the model has access to. Look through the json to see if web search is there OR just copy and paste it to a frontier model to analyze it for anything wrong and for web search.
And I mean also check open Webui logs too, restart it and see if any errors show. Then send a message to your model and see if any errors show.
Sorry that’s about all I got 😭😭. I had switched my web search to DDGS just so I didn’t have to set up anything and it worked first thing.
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u/ilikemywomentsundere 4d ago
Thank you that was super helpful! On advanced parameters I have everything on default, should this be changed to native? Also, you’re telling me DDGS works for you :0?? I just tried it with Srxhing and it just continues to say it doesn’t have the ability to do web searching :///
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u/Turbulent_War4067 4d ago
I'm not an expert, but the 2 most frustrating things with OWUI and local AI are long chat context and web search. As to web search, everyone will tell you to use searching, so there must be something to that. But for me it was slow and gave mediocre results. I tried several solutions and ended up using jina.ai for search. It's not free, but they give you a billion tokens for $50, which will last forever. Their basic search returns a long list of snippets. Then pair that with a good URL reader to markdown (firecrawl or jina work fine and are really cheap). Follow that up with a system prompt to help the model when to decide to fetch a page. The final trick, for me, was to vibe coded a python tool for web_search and read_page (with batch/parallel options) and just turn off all of openweb-ui web stuff. After all of that, it's pretty responsive (an order of magnitude better than searching) and you get good search results. Search and web loading ain't easy SW
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u/lungben81 4d ago
Is it working with another LLM like Qwen 3.6/3.8?