4d ago

Would you use a self-hosted, AI-powered search engine for your favorite sites?

For context I created a video search engine last year, I shut it down and put the data online. You can read about it here: https://www.bendangelo.me/2024/07/16/failed-attempt-at-creating-a-video-search-engine/

I put that project on hold because of scaling issues, anyway I'm back with an other idea. I've been frustrated with how AI slop is ruining the internet and recently it's been hitting Youitube pretty hard with AI videos. I’m brainstorming a tool for people to selfhost:

Self-hosted crawler: Pick which sites/videos to index (blogs, forums, YT channels, etc.). AI chat interface: Ask questions like, “Show me Rust tutorials from 2023” or “Summarize recent posts about homelab backups.” Optional sharing: Pool indexes with trusted friends/communities.

Why? No Google/YouTube spam—only content you choose. Works offline (archive forums, videos, docs). Local AI (Mistral) or cloud (paid) for smarter searches.

Would this be useful to you? What sites would you crawl? Any killer features I’m missing?

Prototype in progress—just testing interest!

41 comments

I personally have zero interest in AI search, if you mean LLM. The fact that it can make stuff up, also means it can miss stuff as well. Neither are acceptable for a search engine.
If you mean some kind of deterministic algorithm for indexing and searching, then maybe.
Also, attempting to crawl sites locally sounds like a great way to get banned from those sites for looking like a bot.
- I can't imagine self hosting an LLM-based search engine would be too viable. The hardware demands, even for a relatively small quantised model, are considerable. Doubly so if you don't have a GPU to accelerate with.
  
  Yeah, absolutely. And running a GPU 24/7 to occasionally search is just a waste of power. I'm not convinced that google and bings AI search makes financial sense either, Google dropped live search (where the results updated as you typed realtime) because it was too expensive, how does LLM search end up cheaper than live search?!
  Edit: This is the live search thing: https://searchengineland.com/test-google-updating-search-results-as-you-type-49116 ~~Annoyingly hard to find, and I can't find the articles on its cancellation, but from memory it was related to expense. ~~
  Edit2: Google Instant Search, and the death was blamed on mobile, and wanting to unify the mobile/desktop experience. I do vaguely remember expense being an unofficial/rumored reason, but I can't back that up.
  
  You can run Deepseek on a Raspberry Pi.

AI uses so much more resources than standard search engines and it comes at a time when the whole planet needs to slow down climate change

No. Take out the AI slop and I might be interested.
- lol that's fair. I'm just brainstorming here

Why the hell does everything have to be AI for you people to be happy? I just plain don't understand it. We know that AI hurts your critical thinking and reasoning skills, and we continue to just pack AI into everything... Doesn't make sense. Sooner or later you're gonna need to ask ChatGPT whether or not you need to wipe your own ass or not.
- There are various levels of AI here
  Storing embeddings/vectors in a search index can make your searches smarter and more relevant. The embeddings squeeze related concepts closer together than pure keyword approaches, which if done well increases retrieval quality.
  RAG tools and AI searches are just a layer on top of your index. When done well these can be really useful in annotating your results and speeding up finding things.
  That’s useful when you’re searching say an error message and the AI is able to iterate on keywords and skim a Guthub issue about it and skip to the resolution.
  Similarly it’s good when you’re researching something but don’t have the exact words, AI search can iterate and capture your intent, then run several queries based on that.
  I don’t find the hallucination problem significant in practice with a lot of AI search tools, but I have found AI is vulnerable to certain types of SEO spam that a human would never fall for.
  As an example most companies have a “comparison to” or “alternatives to” blogpost. The AI does not critically look at the fact that a service is hosting a blogpost shilling their own product. So asking search AI for options is actually poor quality because it will return the shilled results that appear in search first.
  AI also search adds an additional silent layer of filtering, which you need to be conscious of.
  
  But is a search engine we actually figured those out a few years ago, what advantage is AI going to bring? Do we also need ai wheels now?
  This is the smart thing all over again, I don’t need a smart toilet or a smart toothbrush.
- For the average consumer of AI, it's a novelty at this point, even tho we have been using pieces parts of AI for a long while now. But it's getting it's stride in stuff like face swaps, neat tiktok videos, making weird pictures. I liken it to when 'the cloud' came to town. Hell, we've been uploading to servers and running apps on servers for a long while before 'the cloud' happened. Everyone and their brother trampled each other to move their entire operations to the cloud. Then, as the dust all settled, we started realizing that not everything that could be in the cloud, should be in the cloud, and so things got back to normal. But just the words 'the cloud' made CEOs jizz their pants at one time.
  Sameie, sameie with AI. It's a selling point. There was a thread here I believe, talking about an AI rice cooker. The 'AI' part sells it, even tho we've been making excellent rice for millennia. I use AI. I find it a faster way to cut through all the searches and give bulleted points to deviate from. I realize that it's not best practice to rely on AI's word, but use it as a springboard into further investigation.

No. Never would I self-host a search engine.
The crawler would eat up so much more ressources than I am ever willing to spend.
- I've been thinking for years. Maybe there's a way to do a collaborative crawler and indexer. In a similar way on how collaborative science is done. And probably using p2p protocols.
  Get a bunch of people together to create the perfect search engine in these dire times.
  
  Doesn't something like this exist already? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_search_engine
- Potentially that would be a good application of federation and distributed computing
  An Internet archive like distributed tool, that then feeds into local tokenization and indexing.
  Alternatively a centralized service that generates indices and then locally they are queried would save a lot of energy.

No. I'm so bloody fed up with AI "search" solutions that return everything on the fucking planet except what I want. Text search has been a solved problem for a decade. All I want out of a search engine is to be deterministic, stable, and reliable, and to look in titles, descriptions, and keywords. Vibe processing is completely unnecessary and will only create issues.
If you really want to iNnoVAte, then consider creating an index with transcripts and summaries that users can search by keywords.

I don't want AI slop from big corpo and you think I am gonna want AI slop that's just as wasteful and harmful just because it's "locally produced"? That's Republican-ish crap line of thought.

Seems nifty, bake in stuff like selecting your AI provider (support local llama, local openAI api, and if you have to use a third party I guess lol) make sure it's dockerized (or is relatively easy to do, bonus points for including a compose)
OH being able to hook into a self host engine like searxng would be nice too, can do that with Oogabooga web search plug-in currently as an example.

No.
AI search offers me nothing that "normal" search doesn't also offer.
But it uses a thousand times more resources.
10 years ago people were shocked by the size of Google's server halls. Now imagine the increase in size/numbers through AI.
Fuck this shit. The internet isn't what's driving the climate catastrophe, it's how people use it.

Not really. I could use some good selfhosted search engine. I mean all the existing projects (which is just YaCy, to my knowledge) are a bit dated. Nowadays we only got metasearch engines and we're relying on Google, Bing etc.
But I don't need any chatbot enhancements. That's usually something I skip when using Google or Bing because it doesn't work well. The AI summaries tend to be wrong, and it's bad at looking up niche information, which is something I need a search engine to be able to find. The AI just cites the most common slop, or at best the Wikipedia article. But I don't really need any fancy software to get there... So for me, we don't need any AI augmentation.
And I think the old way of googling was fine. Just teach people to put in the words that are likely to be in the article they want to find. That'd be something like "Rust new features 2023" or "homelab backup blog". Sure you can strap on a chatbot and put in entire natural language questions. But I think that's completely unnecessary. We have brains and we're perfectly able to translate our questions into search queries with little effort... If somebody teches us what to type into the search bar, and why.

If I wanted to self host a search engine, I'd just use a proper one that actually searches content rather than regurgitates bullshit.
Search engines worked just fine until Google and Microsoft decided that they wanted to sell their AI products.

I think SearXNG already has AI integration. Not sure how it works though. I don't think that I would personally use AI for things other than summarising what I search but it is a useful feature to have
- Does it? I haven't seen that in my instance settings, will have to take another gander.
  
  Sorry, I was wrong. I think I probably saw it in a blog post where they mentioned creating an AI search engine using SearXNG and Ollama. I don't see any mention of native Ollama integration in the SearXNG docs

I think the really useful idea here is solving the scaling issue by limiting the source sites to a known good set. 95% of the time I am not looking for results from unknown sites. In fact I actively work to get information from the sites I trust.
- Yeah that's the idea. Let people build their own lists and share them.

AI has become an abbreviation for "bad" and I wouldn't want that, but yes, I've been interested for a while in building language models into search engines, to give the queries more reach into the document semantics. Unfortunately, naive approaches like looking for matching vector embeddings instead of (or alongside) search terms seems near useless, and just clutters up the results.
I'd be interested in knowing what approaches you're using. FOSS, I hope.

People will pay for solutions to their problems, and most people and companies don't seem to want to hear - that we have the problem of AI being in everything.
The next BIG THING will have a single marketing label - no AI inside.
Actually, I need to update my github repos with "No AI inside" labels, stickers, etc. Might bring in more visibility.

Isn't that roughly what OpenWebUI does?

While almost everyone here seems to hate AI (maybe for the wrong reason, but who am I to judge) I like to have AI as it is able to provide answers a simple search engine cannot.
What I don't see is hosting something like this myself. The managing of source and indexing them would take too much of my, my server's and the web servers to be indexed energy (maybe I am wrong).
There are already good solutions (OpenWebUI with Ollama) that can be tweaked to almost do what you're describing and the AI models get better every month, so I don't think a custom AI search engine could keep up with it.

Indexing websites adds significant traffic to those sites. It's not a good idea for the health of the internet for everyone to be Indexing, maybe you should search for a precompiled index you can train the lmm on and distribute it daily. Or do the crawling yourself and distribute that index.

Why would I need AI for that? We should really stop trying to slap AI on everything. Also no, I'm not that big of a fan of wasting energy on web crawlers.

Web scrapers are all that's needed,
AI is worthless except for the few uses it has combing through medical data.
AI should never be used to try to influence people.

Absolutely. I'm not as AI-phobic, and I absolutely need both an information gathering agent that searches, follows rss/channels, explores/researches topics, summarizes swats of daily events, and I need a filter between me and corporate internet. Let the AI discard obvious slop, Ads/other propaganda and general informational noise.
However, you should think about how to share search-results so all our agents don't floor small services/commoners. We really need to get more information out of corporate silo's, and into public search/knowledge systems. Perhaps you can integrate some distributed search/knowledge properties ? (now that you have AI to help build it)

AI, get a load of this guy using buzzwords.

41 comments