Perplexica - locally hosted AI search engine

Perplexica is a system similar to Copilot and Perplexity.ai. BUT: Instead of calling copilot or perplexity.ai and telling all the world what you are after, you can now host similar service on your own PC or laptop!

Recently I spent some good time experimenting with Perplexica and testing how it performs on different requests with various LLMs.

1 How it works

• You ask a question
• AI searches the internet
• Then AI summarises all it has found
• Then presents the result with the references to original web sites
• Also a list of images and youtube videos on the right
• Also follow-up questions ready for you to click, if you’d like to explore the topic a bit more

2 Installing and configuring Perplexica

Perplexica can be hosted as an application or in docker container. The most convenient way for me was to use docker.

Perplexica deployment consists of three parts (docker images)

• Perplexica frontend (typescript with Next.js)
• Perplexica backend (typescript with Express.js)
• SearxNG search engine

The project repository contains docker-compose.yaml that will build first images, download third and bring them all up.

If you’d like to try Perplexica yourself - here are the instructions How to self-host Perplexica and Ollama

3 Which model to use with Perplexica

There are several models available for perplexica to use, some of them cloud-hosted, but some can be hosted with Ollama.

You will need at least two models for Perplexica - embeddings model and chat model. For embeddings internally hosteddf

My experiments showed that for me [the best LLM for Perplexica is Mistral Nemo, then Qwen2, then Llama 3.1](https://www.glukhov.org/post/2024/08/perplexica-best-llm/ best LLM for Perplexica).

4 Perplexica alternatives

There are several systems similar to Perplexica.

1. Enterprise-style cloud hosted perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and several others. Awesome and smart. But if you care about your privacy - read the license agreement first.

2. Self-hosted Farfelle. This project is very similar to Perplexica, but less actively developed and have smaller community. Please see here my Comparison of self-hosted AI search engines: Farfalle vs Perplexica

5 My other AI projects, research and experiments

• Object Detection with AI
• LF detection tools and services
• LLMs