Vane (formerly Perplexica)

Vane is a self-hosted AI search engine for people who want answers backed by sources they can check. It combines web research with a choice of local or cloud models and saves search history locally.

• Cited web answers: Search web pages, discussions or academic papers, restrict results to specific domains, and choose modes that favor quick answers or deeper research.
• Questions about files: Upload PDFs, text files or images and ask questions about their contents.
• Visual results and lookups: Find images and videos alongside text results, with relevant cards for weather, calculations and stock prices.
• Search discovery: Get suggestions while typing or browse articles and trending content through Discover.
• Application access: Use its search and answer API in other applications, or access it from your browser's search bar.

Vane runs on your own hardware through Docker or as a server application with a browser interface. It's open source under the MIT license. Web search uses SearxNG, bundled or hosted separately, and needs an internet connection.

Answers can use a local LLM through Ollama or a compatible OpenAI API server, including Lemonade. OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and Groq are also supported; requests to those cloud providers leave your machine.