I’ve been mainly using gemma4:e4b - interestingly, even though it’s supposed be a subset/lesser variant of Gemini for self-hosting, its overall approach in reasoning and iterations over search terminology and query optimisation is much, much better than what you get from Gemini.

And to be fair I also quite like Perplexity - its ability to find relevant information from multiple sources, find both supporting and counter arguments where relevant, and build quite precise summaries. I do wish it was DIY-able, but with all the malicious actors I don’t feel comfortable allowing any LLM to just browse the net, who knows, even with properly secured tool calling, prompt injection can happen.