The Only Honest Guide to Web Search in Ollama

The Only Honest Guide to Web Search in Ollama Every other tutorial gets this wrong. Here's what actually works. I wanted to add web search to my local Ollama setup. I found a Medium article that looked promising. It used DuckDuckGo's free API. I followed it exactly. It returned empty results. Every time. For every query. So I spent two days testing every approach on a real Debian 13 server with Ollama 0.18.2. This is what I found. First: The DuckDuckGo Lie Every tutorial recommends this: response = requests . get ( " https://api.duckduckgo.com/ " , params = { " q " : query , " format " : " json " } ) Here's what it actually returns: { "Abstract" : "" , "AbstractText" : "" , "RelatedTopics" : [], "Results" : [] } Empty. I verified it with curl: curl "https://api.duckduckgo.com/?q=ollama+latest+version&format=json&no_html=1" The meta section reveals why — it's a test endpoint in "development" state, marked offline. DuckDuckGo's free API is not a real search API. What Actually Works After