> I wish LLMs were good at search
The entire situation of web search for LLMs is a mess. None of the existing providers return good or usable results; and Google refuses to provide general access to theirs. As a result, all LLMs (except maybe Gemini) are severely gimped forever until someone solves this.
I seriously believe that the only real new breakthrough for LLM research can be achieved by a clean, trustworthy, comprehensive search index. Maybe someone will build that? Otherwise we’re stuck with subpar results indefinitely.
YaCy does a pretty good job, and is free, and you can run yourself, so the quality/experience is pretty much up to you. Paired together with a local GPT-OSS-120b with reasoning_effort set to high, I'm getting pretty good results. Validated with questions I do know the answer to, and seems alright although could be better of course, still getting better results out of GPT5.2 Pro which I guess is to be expected.
The point of my comment was that the AI/LLM is almost irrelevant in light of low quality search engine APIs/indexes. Is there a way to validate the actual quality and comprehensiveness of YaCY beyond anecdata?
> Is there a way to validate the actual quality and comprehensiveness of YaCY beyond anecdata?
No, because it's your own index essentially, hence the "the quality/experience is pretty much up to you" part.
Yeah, that’s not really reassuring nor indicative of its usefulness or value.
Yeah, if that's how you feel about your own abilities, then I guess that's the way it is. Not sure what that has to do with YaCy or my original comment.
Respectfully, you said:
> YaCy does a pretty good job
I assume that should be qualified with some basic amount of evidence beyond “I said so”? Anyways, thanks for pointing me in the direction of YaCy, will try it out.
How to build a search engine, apparently:
1. Install YaCy
2. Draw the rest of the owl