Best Self-Hostable AI Search Engines in 2026?

Posted by And1mon@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 10 comments

I have OpenWebUI running, but their web search doesn't cut it for me.

I would prefer a Perplexity-like app, which is why i am currently testing Vane (formerly Perplexica).
However it is riddled with bugs and inconsistencies, so i am researching some alternatives.

There are a lot of abandoned projects, ones I found that were still maintained so far:

Vane: https://github.com/ItzCrazyKns/Vane

Scira: https://github.com/zaidmukaddam/scira

Morphic: https://github.com/miurla/morphic

Has anyone tried any of these, or do you guys have alternatives?

I feel like we still have lots of improvements to be made in this field.

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RoamingOmen@reddit

SearNg I use it for my local chat ui - it’s pretty reliable and fast

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awitod@reddit

I’ve spent a lot of time on this question and I completely agree. For small scale use, that with a VPN is the best answer.

Otherwise, pay for Brave search

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I just found out that open webui built in web tool is actually just web RAG, the LLM doesn't use it, a search happens and then summaries are given to the LLM with your prompt so it has no idea that the Internet was used or for it to make a tool call to it. Maybe it would be different as an MCP. If you are looking to give your LLM access to the Internet I am currently trying to use SearXng and crawl4ai as custom tools with Pi agent. Crawl4ai gives beautiful markdown of any URL it is honestly amazing. SearXng let's it search to find the URLs to crawl but I am currently debugging the code as it was custom. Easiest way to give an LLM great use of web search is with Jina.ai, they have a very generous 10 million token free API and an MCP for any LLM. Playwriter is a chrome extension with MCP/CLI use to let the LLM directly control your actual chrome browser, it uses playwright under the hood and is easy to connect. If you are looking for a search engine for you to use with AI built in I have heard about perplexica/vane but I haven't tried it and interested to know if I should. Otherwise you could vibe code a custom webpage that sends your query to an LLM with a SearXng connection that then re-ranks it for you displaying the results on the webpage in a pretty way.

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Intelligent-Form6624@reddit

https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl

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And1mon@reddit (OP)

This looks promising. How do you integrate it, if you have used it before?

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Intelligent-Form6624@reddit

Ask your favourite LLM 😉

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And1mon@reddit (OP)

Hey yeah, maybe my comment was misphrased, I just meant to ask if you have a preferred frontend or app you use in combination with it.

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Intelligent-Form6624@reddit

I’ve never used it. I recently watched a Youtube showing the setup steps for Hermes agent, and Firecrawl is the only self-hostable option. I’ve been meaning to try it.

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fastcrw@reddit

did you see GitHub us/crw ? Completely made for that easy use and lightweight only 6 mb for crawling for local agents, in cloud version is cheaper and faster option for firecrawl, tavily serpapi etc, check and let me know your ideas

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And1mon@reddit (OP)

Will check it out!