Question: how are you generally wiring up search? Just a proxy to a commercial search API like the Google API? I keep trying to find options that are less $$$ but haven't had much luck.
Replies
I'm using Wikipedia and DuckDuckGo Instant Answers APIs with Qwen 3. I send a header with my info to be nice.
aug 5, 2025, 10:02 pm • 0 0 • view
I have SearXNG running in a Docker container. Free, non-rate-limited, and fairly privacy-friendly depending on which engines you set up SearXNG itself to call
aug 5, 2025, 8:30 pm • 2 0 • view
According to oss-20b itself, the DuckDuckGo server is free? I have yet to test this effectively, though.
aug 5, 2025, 8:21 pm • 3 0 • view
Exa has a good search too, quite good, but the MCP server is wonky exa.ai
aug 6, 2025, 12:06 am • 4 0 • view
I got brave search working + fetch, has a free tier ok for experimenting , poc archived, may not be developed going forward github.com/modelcontext... github.com/modelcontext...
aug 6, 2025, 1:27 pm • 2 0 • view
Got the mcp working with Claude but not local yet
aug 6, 2025, 1:28 pm • 2 0 • view
yeah exa is probably the best option if you want affordable web search and tool calls plus the setup is usually pretty straightforward if you follow their docs at docs.exa.ai. everything else is either expensive or doesn’t work smoothly with local agents.
aug 6, 2025, 1:05 pm • 2 0 • view
Will try this. Ollama has some built-in search capacity (at least for interactive use) but it is quite slow.
aug 6, 2025, 1:07 pm • 2 0 • view
Brave just launched their grounding/serch api today. Same price per 1k queries as google but much higher limits brave.com/search/api/
aug 5, 2025, 8:21 pm • 1 0 • view