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> 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 Goog
by yunohn 9mo ago
> 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.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoYaCy 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.
- yunohn 9mo agoThe 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?
- embedding-shape 9mo ago> 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.
- yunohn 9mo agoYeah, that’s not really reassuring nor indicative of its usefulness or value.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoYeah, 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.
- yunohn 9mo agoRespectfully, 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.
- immibis 9mo agoHow to build a search engine, apparently: 1. Install YaCy 2. Draw the rest of the owl