Using Microsoft Web IQ to Enhance OpenWebUI: No-Code Web Search and Automatic Link Reading
In my previous article, I migrated the OpenWebUI database to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. In my day-to-day use of OpenWebUI, I kept running into two problems: No access to the latest information: Models have a knowledge cutoff. When I ask about recent releases, news, or prices, they either can’t answer or get it wrong. Pasted links are never opened: When I paste the URL of an article, a document, or a GitHub page into the chat and ask the model to summarize, translate, or compare it, the model doesn’t read the link at all. Sometimes it even guesses content that “looks plausible” from the URL alone. Both problems can be solved with OpenWebUI’s web capabilities. In this article, I use Microsoft’s new Microsoft Web IQ as the web search engine, and let the model automatically detect URLs in messages and read the pages before answering. All it takes is creating a Web IQ resource in the Azure portal and then configuring OpenWebUI in its admin UI. No code to write and no extra services to deploy. ...