FreeAskInternet is a free, private and locally running search-and-answer engine: you ask a question, it searches multiple web engines, feeds the combined results to a large language model and writes you an answer — all on your own machine, with no GPU required. The Apache-2.0 project has earned more than 8,700 stars on GitHub.
AI answer engines are convenient but normally mean trusting a hosted service with every question. FreeAskInternet rebuilds that experience as a local application: it aggregates results from several search engines, de-duplicates and ranks them, then has an LLM synthesize an answer grounded in those sources. The models can be ones you already use — it supports a range of providers and local setups — and because the heavy lifting is search plus API calls, it runs comfortably on an ordinary laptop. Everything, including your query history, stays local.
FreeAskInternet is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license. Depending on the LLM provider you configure, you may use your own API key.
The interface shows the sources behind each answer, so you can open the original pages when a claim matters instead of trusting the synthesis blindly. Since the aggregator itself imposes no account system or usage tier, it is also a handy reference implementation for anyone building a private, self-hosted answer engine.
It is for privacy-minded users and tinkerers who like the Perplexity-style workflow of cited AI answers but want it running on their own hardware, under their own control.