Perplexica
Privacy-focused AI answering engine with web search and citations
Perplexica is a privacy-focused AI answering engine designed to run on your own hardware. It combines web search results with local or hosted LLMs to generate natural-language answers with cited sources.
Key Features
- Web search integration powered by SearxNG to aggregate results from multiple engines
- Supports local models via Ollama and multiple cloud LLM providers via API configuration
- Answer generation with cited sources for traceability
- Multiple search modes (speed/balanced/quality) to trade off latency vs depth
- File uploads for document-based Q&A (such as PDFs, text files, and images)
- Image and video search alongside standard web results
- Domain-scoped search to focus results on specific websites
- Smart query suggestions and a local search history
- Built-in API for integrating search and answering into other applications
Use Cases
- Private, self-hosted alternative to Perplexity-style web answering for individuals or teams
- Research assistant that produces source-cited summaries from the open web
- Internal tool that combines uploaded documents with web search for faster troubleshooting
Limitations and Considerations
- Answer quality and latency depend heavily on the chosen model/provider and the availability/quality of web search results
- Some functionality requires external provider API keys when not using a local model
Perplexica is well-suited for users who want a Perplexity-like experience while keeping searches and data under their control. With SearxNG-based search, configurable LLM backends, and citations, it aims to balance privacy, usability, and answer reliability.
Categories:
Tags:
Tech Stack:
Ollama
Docker
TypeScript
Next.js
Node.jsSimilar Services
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