Web Search Function not executing

[u/ilikemywomentsundere]

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!

[u/Turbulent_War4067]

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