Run Perplexica locally for AI-powered search with citations and no tracking. Your queries stay private.

What is Perplexica?

Perplexica is an open-source AI search engine inspired by Perplexity. It combines web search with a local LLM to provide cited, conversational answers to your questions. Unlike Perplexity's cloud service, Perplexica runs entirely on your machine.

Your search queries are never logged, tracked, or used for advertising. This is AI search with full privacy.

How It Works

Perplexica uses a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline:

Your question is sent to a search engine (SearXNG, self-hosted)
Relevant web pages are fetched and parsed
The content is chunked and ranked by relevance
A local LLM synthesizes an answer with inline citations

The LLM sees real web content, so answers are grounded in sources rather than hallucinated.

Installation

Install Perplexica from the Thumper-Run catalog. Thumper sets up SearXNG as a dependency and configures the LLM connection through Ollama. The install pipeline handles all wiring.

Choosing a Model

For search-and-summarize tasks, you want a model with strong instruction following and factual accuracy:

Llama 3.1 8B – fast, good enough for most queries
Qwen 3 14B – better at synthesizing complex multi-source answers
Mistral Nemo 12B – excellent at following citation formatting instructions

Use Cases

Research – get cited answers without wading through SEO spam
Competitive analysis – search without your queries being tracked by Google
Legal/medical research – sensitive queries that should not be logged anywhere
Offline-capable – pre-index local documents for air-gapped search

Privacy Benefits

Traditional search engines track every query. Even Perplexity's cloud service stores your search history. With Perplexica running locally:

No query logging – searches exist only in your local history
No tracking – SearXNG proxies requests without identifying you
No ads – results are ranked by relevance, not revenue
Optional sync – current supported relay-assisted paths are server-assisted; private E2EE remains gated

See our privacy post for the full data protection model.

Ready to try it? Download Thumper-Run free →