August 1st, 2024

Building a Local Perplexity Alternative with Perplexica, Ollama, and SearXNG

The article outlines how to create a self-hosted alternative to the AI search engine Perplexity using open-source tools, emphasizing cost-effectiveness and customization through a step-by-step installation guide.

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Building a Local Perplexity Alternative with Perplexica, Ollama, and SearXNG

The article discusses how to create a self-hosted alternative to the AI search engine Perplexity using open-source tools. Perplexity is known for providing concise answers to queries, but it charges $20 per month for its Pro Search feature. The guide outlines a method to build a similar system on personal hardware without ongoing costs. The proposed setup utilizes Terminus, an open-source operating system based on Kubernetes, along with tools like Ollama, SearXNG, and Perplexica.

The workflow of Perplexity involves sending a user query to search engines, retrieving results, and using an AI model to generate a coherent answer. The self-hosted version replaces these components with open-source alternatives: Ollama for hosting language models, SearXNG for fetching real-time search results, and Perplexica to integrate the system.

The article provides a step-by-step guide for installation and configuration, starting with launching Terminus, installing the necessary applications, and configuring them to work together. It emphasizes the ease of deployment and flexibility offered by Terminus, allowing users to access their self-hosted search engine from any device.

The conclusion encourages users to experiment with their setup and explore additional AI projects. Overall, this guide presents a cost-effective and customizable solution for those interested in self-hosting an AI search engine.

Link Icon 11 comments
By @voidUpdate - 6 months
Am I understanding perplexity right? You put your query into a system that googles it, then pipes the results through an AI to give you an answer? Doesn't google already do that now with their AI summary at the top of the search results?
By @CGamesPlay - 6 months
What is this Terminus thing? Half the links on the github pages are 404s, the screenshots of applications just link to larger versions of the screenshots, and it seems like it's trying to alternate between being a highly distributed control plane and a homelab service that runs on a raspberry pi.
By @rcarmo - 6 months
I just did that with docker-compose: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2024/06/23/1300

Much less fuss and zero weird stuff.

By @jumploops - 6 months
Slight correction: I believe Perplexity runs their own search index.
By @adsharma - 6 months
Except that this can't do auto complete in the URL bar on major browsers, including Firefox.

Autocomplete works if you visit localhost:port in the browser.

I've asked around. It seems like an anticompetitive behavior on the part of browser vendors.

By @armcat - 6 months
Perplexity doesn't actually use Google Search directly. It uses its own indexer and crawler called PerplexityBot [1]. It then uses a mixture of Google and Bing ranking signals to "help" with some of its own search result ranking. I presume they have their own ranker that has some relevancy score based on site recency, cosine similarity of site data with search query, etc, and they combine this with Google and Bing ranking signals.

[1] https://nypost.com/2024/06/28/business/amazon-probing-ai-sta...

By @thanksgiving - 6 months
Congratulations on front page. AMD GPU support would be nice.
By @pqs - 6 months
I tried Perplexity a few times, but I cannot see the point. Are you using it? How is it better than other tools?
By @oceanplexian - 6 months
Step 1) Install an App marketplace.

Uhhh, no.

By @ktosobcy - 6 months
> You’ve probably heard of Perplexity,

nope…