Needle: The benchmark your search engine can't memorize

MarkusQ•about 3 hours ago

I wonder if search engines linked to human-use-case engines (e.g. google/bing) start at a disadvantage because they have been historically incentivized to break themselves to support their business models? It seems reasonable to suppose that "good at selling ads" ≠ "good at finding results".

terno•about 4 hours ago

do you somehow control how non-trivial the queries are? The LLM generates them, right?

what if every engine returns garbage, or on the other hand, handles them too well?

building a benchmark like this in a genuinely fair way seems extremely hard to me. I’m very curious about the details, of course within what you can share.

matt4711•about 4 hours ago

It is hard to be fair I agree. We tried to be open about what we do here: github.com/keenableai/needle

The queries from what I can tell are not trivial. The actual github repo of the benchmark has a judgement/query browser where you can inspect the different query streams: https://keenableai.github.io/needle/

matt4711•about 5 hours ago

One of the authors here. We have been seeing lots of benchmaxxing and leakage in standard web search benchmarks such as BrowseComp.

We developed this live benchmark with daily/hourly sampled fresh queries matching real agentic search traffic to estimate actual search performance of different AI search providers.

hexer303•about 3 hours ago

It seems that the agentic search benchmarks have fallen victim to reward hacking, just like the coding benchmarks. It's good to see mitigation efforts being made to address this problem.

What do you foresee in the future releases and improvements to this?

Alexwortega•about 4 hours ago

Do you think it will be possible to train on this bench?

matt4711•about 3 hours ago

The judgements are available on huggingface so training is possible. But given that we evaluate on new queries daily there would need to be some generalization happening for this to show up in the benchmark.

mpalmer•about 1 hour ago

The blog post appears to get confused and devotes its entire second half to pitching Keenable itself. If the idea is to build credibility for the new benchmark, this maybe was not the best choice.

    Search engines with their own indexes can retrieve documents no one else has. That means your agents will be able to answer questions previously unanswerable.

Besides the clear AI smell, this nonsensical claim also plainly contradicts the methodology's key evaluation claim that the quality of an engine's results should be measured against how much it overlaps with the reranked aggregate of the other engines. The benchmark thus seemingly values an engine's ability to "answer unanswerable questions" at zero.

    Search engines should improve from being used in a way where the quality improvement is not an engineering push but a property of the architecture. That's a learning machine, and it's the only kind of system that can adapt to agents.

Yeah? Care to cite anything for that?

Needle: The benchmark your search engine can't memorize

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