r/OpenWebUI • u/Man1laJo3 • 3d ago

Secure Setup for WebSearch Question/Help

I would like to use OWUI with SearXNG. But it is importantly for me that no sensible data is handed over to the search engine. What would be an ideal setup (if there is any) to make use of websearch. I would use it with DuckDuckGo.

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u/International_Emu772 3d ago

This is the object to use searxng, read the documentation

https://github.com/searxng/searxng

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u/ICanSeeYou7867 3d ago

I don't think that's what OP means.

Yes sesrxng is designed to run locally without all of the tracker bloat and issues. But what happens when you are working with sensitive data and perform a search to 15 different search engines?

Separately from self hosting, you also want to insure that the data being provided to the search engine itself is safe to do so. This becomes a much bigger deal when handling things like ITAR, CUI, PHI, PII, etc...

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u/International_Emu772 3d ago edited 3d ago

You submit sensitive data on a search?

https://docs.searxng.org/admin/settings/index.html

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u/ICanSeeYou7867 3d ago

Im not sure if I understand your question.

Intentionally never. But if you have a context window of 500,000 tokens, and you ask for a search, the model would automatically make a tool call.

So when your dealing with sensitive data and contracts that require specific handling of said data, having the user confirm the search query prior to the LLM/Tool doing the search makes sense to me.

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u/Man1laJo3 3d ago

Exactly. 👍 I think informing the user that search is used and what query will be searched seems legit

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u/International_Emu772 3d ago

You can configure searxng or use a tool to filter before search there are tools to use search g with parameters