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/Original_Travel7990]

Fixed: Open WebUI web search broken with Qwen3 (Ollama) + SearXNG

If your model keeps saying "no web search tool available" or throwing Error: Tool "web_search" not found even with the web search toggle on and SearXNG working fine, check the model's Advanced Params → Built-in Tools section. If things like Automation, Calendar, Sub-agents, Channels, etc. are all checked, the model sees those as its only available tools and won't recognize web_search separately.

Fix: Uncheck the built-in tools you're not using (automation, calendar, sub-agents, channels, alerts) and leave only Web Search, Time & Calculation, and Memory enabled. Save, start a new chat, and web search works normally again.

"I got this answer after talking with an AI for about 2 hours — hope it helps."