Perplexica is a free and transparent search engine that understands what you’re asking and finds exactly what you’re looking for, all powered by the latest generation of artificial intelligence. Sounds familiar, right?

Well, yes, it’s like Perplexity.ai except it’s free, open source, and allows you to dive deep into the web to find answers to all your questions. To do this, the tool uses machine learning algorithms based on semantic similarity search. In short, it can grasp the meaning of your question and find the most relevant sources.

This way, you get clear, sourced answers served up on a silver platter without needing to spend hours sifting through pages of results to find the information you’re interested in.

No cookies spying on you, no sneaky selling of personal data, and your searches remain confidential. In terms of features, Perplexica offers several handy search modes:

Copilot Mode (still in development): It generates queries to find the most relevant internet sources. Rather than using only the context provided by SearXNG, it directly visits the top results to find the best sources for your question.
Normal Mode: It processes your query and performs a classic web search.
Focus Modes: Specialized modes to meet specific needs, such as academic research, YouTube search, calculations via Wolfram Alpha, or Reddit search for discussions and opinions.
Technically, it uses a well-designed meta search engine called SearXNG. It retrieves, sorts, and cross-references the results to keep only the best. The advantage is that you always have up-to-date information without any latency. And as I mentioned at the beginning, it also relies on local language models like Llama3 and Mixtral, via the Ollama API, which allows it to refine the results even more.

And installing it is super simple:

  1. Clone the Perplexica GitHub repository: git clone https://github.com/ItzCrazyKns/Perplexica.git
  2. Rename the sample.config.toml file to config.toml and fill in the necessary fields (API key, etc.)
  3. Run the command docker compose up -d
  4. Wait a few minutes for the installation to complete
  5. Access Perplexica via http://localhost:31337 from your browser

Once it’s set up, you can even use Perplexica as the default search engine in your browser. Just go to the settings, add a new search engine with the URL http://localhost:31337/?q=%s and you’re done!

Of course, it’s still a young project, so there are some things to fine-tune. The developers are working on finalizing Copilot Mode, adding a settings page, features like search history, and support for local language models.

But even as it stands, I think it’s definitely worth testing out Perplexica, if only to see what an ethical and transparent AI-powered search engine can look like.

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