Open-source AI search grew up: a look at Perplexica
Perplexity-style answers with cited sources, running on your own hardware and your own models. The open-source alternative is closer than you think.
The pitch for AI search is simple: ask a question, get a real answer with sources, skip the ten blue links. Perplexity proved people want it. Perplexica proves you can have it without the subscription — or the data leaving your network.
What it is
Perplexica is an open-source, self-hostable AI search engine. Point it at local models or hosted ones, and it returns sourced answers in the same shape Perplexity made familiar — with the citations right there to check.
Why it matters
Two reasons. Privacy: your queries and the documents you search never touch a third party. Control: you choose the model, the sources, and the cost. For anyone handling sensitive work — legal, health, internal docs — that’s the difference between “useful” and “can’t touch it.”
Where it fits
It’s also the clearest illustration of a pattern we keep coming back to: the sourced-answer experience that felt like magic eighteen months ago is now something you can stand up yourself in an afternoon. We list it in Resources as both a repo and an app — clone it, or just run it.
Sources
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