SmokeyDope

Sounds like ollama was loaded up with an either overly censored or plain brain dead language model. Do you know which model it was? Maybe try mistral if it fits in your computer.

I run kobold.cpp which is a cutting edge local model engine, on my local gaming rig turned server. I like to play around with the latest models to see how they improve/change over time. The current chain of thought thinking models like deepseek r1 distills and qwen qwq are fun to poke at with advanced open ended STEM questions.

As for actual use: I prefer using mistral small 24b and treating it like a local search engine with the legitimacy of wikipedia. I ask it questions about general things I don’t know about or want advice on, it usually then do further research through more legitimate sources. Its important to not take the LLM too seriously as theres always a small statistical chance it hallucinates some bullshit but most of the time its fairly accurate and is a pretty good jumping off point for further research.

Like if I want an overview of how can I repair holes concrete, or general ideas on how to invest. If the LLM says a word or related concept I don’t recognize I grill it for clarifying info.

I’ve used an LLM to help me go through old declassified documents and speculate on internal gov terminalogy I was unfamiliar with.

I’ve used a speech to text model and get it to speek just for fun. Ive used multimodal model and get it to see/scan documents for info.

Ive used websearch to get the model to retrieve information it didn’t know off a ddg search, again mostly for fun.

Feel free to ask me anything, I’m glad to help get newbies started.

I wrote a guide on here about the differences between alternative search engines. I recommend for you either YaCy or marginalia.nu. searxng supports calling YaCy (I actually contributed to that feature on the github).

The problem with decentralized engines like marginalia and YaCy is that they aren’t good at the things a average user wants from a typical search engine. Ideally a search engine is meant to quickly provide you links to webpages which are strongly related in content to you are looking for. Shopping, weather, map directions, local business hours. On some level you need to prioritize showing the user what they want ideally within the first few results.

Decentralized engines by their nature don’t do this easily. Instead using YaCy or marginalia feels like a scavenger hunt where you get handed a page of random websites loosely connected by your keyword search term and are told to start looking. YaCy has a user curated priority system but not enough user mass adoption to be worth a damn in practice.

So sadly if you want anything resembling google or bing results for your practical convinence driven daily internet searching needs, you need to scrape them or use one of their few real competitors with their own indexers and web crawlers. So really your options are scraping google, bing, mojeek, qwant, kagi and DuckDuckGo(ish they still use bing for indexing a lot). Out of those Ive actually warmed up to Kagi over the year. I was put off at the idea of subscription based internet search but its a really good service they provide and they line out their reasoning for pricing well. They seem to be using that monthly sub money to actually improve the service and user experiences while remaining transparent with constant changelogs and blog updates. Privacy pass, available TOR access, and anonymous payment options are green flags to me.