Hintglass
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Set up web search in Hintglass
To look facts up with ⌥⌘F (Option-Command-F) in Hintglass, a macOS menu-bar app, choose a search service in Settings → Search, save its key and click Test search.
There are two services: Brave LLM Context, which takes a Brave Search API key, and Ollama web search, which takes an Ollama Cloud key.
Set it up
- Choose Settings… from the Hintglass menu.
- In Search, pick a Service. With None, a search press shows “Search unavailable — Settings → Search.”
- Save its key. For Brave LLM Context, paste your Brave Search API key into Key and click Save to Keychain. Ollama web search uses your Ollama Cloud key: with Ollama Cloud as your connection’s host it is already saved, and Key status reads “Saved in Settings → Connection”; with any other host, paste it here and click Save to Keychain.
- Click Test search. It sends one search request to check the service and the key, and reports how many usable sources came back, such as “Passed — 3 sources in 1.2 s.”
- Start a new session. Search changes apply the next time you start a session; a running session keeps the service and key it started with.
The key is stored in your login Keychain and sent only to the search service. The Ollama Cloud key is one key for both: a connection to Ollama Cloud uses the same one.
What a search sends
Your audio never leaves the Mac. When you ask for an answer, the conversation’s transcript so far, from both sides, and your profile go to your AI provider; ⌥⌘C (Option-Command-C) adds a screenshot of the window in front of you, and a search press sends the interviewer’s words to the search service you chose. For a search, that means:
- The interviewer’s latest words go, as they said them, to the search service.
- Up to three of its results go to your AI provider, each a title, the site’s address and an excerpt, never a URL.
- The answer is one sentence that cites one result. The row under it names that result’s site and title, taken from the results, never from the answer’s text.
On Anthropic, Ollama Cloud and Ollama on your Mac, Hintglass also sends a warm-up in the background, even if you never ask: your profile, and on Ollama the conversation’s transcript so far, within a session’s first minute and then once or twice a minute, so the next answer starts faster.
Settings → Search shows what each service says it keeps of a query. Brave’s reads “Brave keeps a record of your search queries for up to 90 days, for billing and troubleshooting. Zero retention is for Enterprise plans only.” Ollama’s reads “Ollama publishes no retention period for web search queries. Its privacy policy says cloud prompts and responses are not stored beyond the request.”