Perplexica is a Self-hosted Perplexity Alternative with Full-Privacy Enabled
Perplexica is an AI-powered search engine. It is an Open source alternative to Perplexity AI
Table of Content
A few days ago, I stumbled upon Perplexica, an open-source AI search tool that’s quickly becoming my go-to for smarter, more private research.
What is Perplexica?
If you’ve used Perplexity AI , you’ll feel right at home. Perplexica works the same way: you ask a question, and instead of just dumping links, it understands what you’re asking, scours the web, and gives you a clear, concise answer, with sources cited. No endless clicking through search results. No guesswork.
But here’s the kicker: Perplexica is 100% open source.
Hazem Abbas
That means no black boxes, no hidden tracking, and full transparency. It uses SearxNG under the hood, a privacy-focused, decentralized search aggregator, so it stays current, ad-free, and fully open. No corporate data harvesting. No paywalls.
Hazem Abbas
What really impressed me is how it leverages AI smarts like semantic search, embeddings, and similarity matching to dig deeper and return more relevant answers. It doesn’t just match keywords, it understands context.
Features
- Local LLMs: You can make use local LLMs such as Llama3 and Mixtral using Ollama.
- Two Main Modes:
- Copilot Mode: (In development) Boosts search by generating different queries to find more relevant internet sources. Like normal search instead of just using the context by SearxNG, it visits the top matches and tries to find relevant sources to the user's query directly from the page.
- Normal Mode: Processes your query and performs a web search.
- Focus Modes: Special modes to better answer specific types of questions. Perplexica currently has 6 focus modes:
- All Mode: Searches the entire web to find the best results.
- Writing Assistant Mode: Helpful for writing tasks that do not require searching the web.
- Academic Search Mode: Finds articles and papers, ideal for academic research.
- YouTube Search Mode: Finds YouTube videos based on the search query.
- Wolfram Alpha Search Mode: Answers queries that need calculations or data analysis using Wolfram Alpha.
- Reddit Search Mode: Searches Reddit for discussions and opinions related to the query.
- Current Information: Some search tools might give you outdated info because they use data from crawling bots and convert them into embeddings and store them in a index. Unlike them, Perplexica uses SearxNG, a metasearch engine to get the results and rerank and get the most relevant source out of it, ensuring you always get the latest information without the overhead of daily data updates.
- API: Integrate Perplexica into your existing applications and make use of its capibilities.
- Add settings page
- Adding support for local LLMs
- History Saving features
- Introducing various Focus Modes
- Adding API support
- Adding Discover
Hazem Abbas
License
MIT License
Resources & Downloads
ItzCrazyKns
