Perplexica: Open-source Perplexity alternative

by sean_pedersenon 5/24/24, 2:49 AMwith 83 comments
by yositoon 5/24/24, 6:46 AM

It would be awesome if this could also search my Obsidian notes at the same time, and if it worked seamlessly on all of my devices.

by recklesson 5/24/24, 6:16 AM

Looks similar to what I've been using for a few weeks https://github.com/miurla/morphic

by octobus2021on 5/24/24, 3:03 PM

I absolutely love this and will try as many as possible very soon. I think "intelligent search" (asking LLM questions to search on the Web by communicating, preferably by voice) is one of the few solid use cases for LLM. I hate the idea of having this happen in the cloud with someone having my data, so doing this locally with my local LLM would be ideal.

by allanrboon 5/24/24, 5:44 AM

First I’m hearing of the meta search engine SearxNG too. Neat. Feel like we’ve come full circle, going back to meta search engines again.

by rashadphilon 5/24/24, 2:45 PM

Here is another open-source alternative: https://github.com/rashadphz/farfalle (Disclaimer: I made it)

by sc077yon 5/29/24, 10:11 AM

Very interesting. I'm building a RAG chatbot and I haven't done the inline citations yet, I honestly thought it was a lot more complicated then just telling the llms to cite with a number and then have numbers next the sources. I did something to that extent as kind of a joke and it worked but the llm didn't always listen. I thought either post processing (checking cosine distance between sentences and retrieved chunks) or function calling would be the way to go.

by behnamohon 5/24/24, 4:43 PM

It was about time someone made an alternative to Perplexity.

by spdustinon 5/26/24, 1:22 AM

I want to like it. But not supporting deployments and closing tickets submitted by people who are trying to get it running in their homelab turned me right off. The configuration shouldn't be that fragile.

by Cilvicon 5/24/24, 9:16 AM

This is cool. My biggest question was "does it work?" then I had another look at the repo and saw the "Repocloud" one click deployment. And it's quite well done. Apart from signin up for the repocloud account (3$ free credit) and waiting for the deployment (5mins) ... I'm now waiting for my first answer which doesn't seem to come through and there are not a many ways to trouble shoot as far as I can see... I've asked on discord

by KRAKRISMOTTon 5/24/24, 6:09 AM

Can you add support for Serp API? I prefer to pay for a managed proxy farm instead of using SearxNG which requires too much babysitting.

by fudged71on 5/24/24, 4:05 PM

Are there any benchmarks to compare these online research agents? There’s so many to choose from now but it’s hard to compare them

by sanjayk0508on 5/24/24, 9:29 AM

There's been many other good alternative of perplexica before

by jon309on 5/24/24, 10:30 PM

Super cool! I would love if we could make this serverless and easily deployable with CDK or Terraform. Maybe I’ll take that up as a side project, who knows!

by jakozauron 5/24/24, 10:27 AM

Sorry to say, but this looks like a trademark violation. Though the project may be cool, it immediately put me off:

https://www.trademarkia.com/perplexityai-98400215

I'm not a lawyer, but trademarks are well protected. You can provide similar services and confuse customers by using almost identical names. Don't do Gooogle search engine, Macrosoft OS, etc.

If they will get traction, Perplexity could force them to rebrand.

by tcsenpaion 5/24/24, 1:16 PM

I was waiting for this moment since months. Sir, you are the GOAT

by webprofusionon 5/24/24, 7:49 AM

When making an alternative to something, don't reference the name of the thing you're copying if that thing has (or can afford) a legal team to protect their brand. If your product can reasonably be confused with the original (it can) they will eat your soul.

by pants2on 5/24/24, 6:27 AM

I made my own version of this for personal use some time ago, it's a fun project! I use Kagi for the search backend and Colly/ScrapingFish (which has plans starting at $2) for getting the content. Both work really well!

by chakintoshon 5/24/24, 10:42 AM

I've been using Perplexity for months now on the Free tire (with the 5 Pro searches/4 hours) and its been plenty for me and I use it has completely replaced google for me. So I'm not sure where Perplexica fits in my use case, especially that I'll have to install and maintain it and use lesser models than Perplexity.

by dcreateron 5/24/24, 2:01 PM

Anyone used it yet? Was posted here a while back. I'm interested to hear whether it works and how good it is rather than many "this looks great" comments. Perplexity.ai itself has been pretty poor for me after I got past the honeymoon phase

by michelsedghon 5/24/24, 8:32 AM

Thank you so much for posting this and ofc the creators. My brother and I were in a debate and this just proved my point. Feels real good to see it. Cant wait to try it ;)

by hackernewdson 5/24/24, 5:41 AM

How is this related to Perplexity?

by rvzon 5/24/24, 11:34 AM

Both Perplexica and Perplexity are bad names for a search engine.

Very perplexed as to who was the smart person that chose this dreadful name for the company.

Yes, it has another definition in context to information theory; which my point is, I used the first definition like a normal person would, which is commonly associated with...

'...a state of confusion or a complicated and difficult situation or thing.' - Cambridge English Dictionary [0]

None of them can ever become a verb that makes sense like 'google it'.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/perplexi...