Weaviate has released an `effort` parameter for the Query Agent's Search Mode in `weaviate-agents 1.8.0` and `agents-typescript-client 1.7.0`. Three tiers — medium, high, and ultrahigh — control how much compute is spent on query decomposition and reranking at inference time. Benchmarks across 8 datasets (BRIGHT, IRPAPERS, WixQA, OBLIQ-Bench) show consistent accuracy gains over Hybrid Search at every tier, with the largest improvements on reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks. On BRIGHT Biology, ultrahigh effort lifts nDCG@10 from 13.0 to 57.5 — roughly a 4x improvement. On simpler domain-specific benchmarks like WixQA, medium effort already captures most of the gain. The tradeoff is latency and cost, making tier selection a per-request decision based on application needs.
Table of contents
Benchmarks What is Search Mode? Conclusion Ready to start building? Don't want to miss another blog post?Questions this post answers
What nDCG@10 score does Weaviate Search Mode ultrahigh effort achieve on BRIGHT Biology compared to Hybrid Search?
Ultrahigh effort Search Mode achieves nDCG@10 of 57.5 on BRIGHT Biology, compared to 13.0 with Hybrid Search alone — roughly a 4x improvement. The gains are largest on reasoning-intensive benchmarks like BRIGHT, where queries demand multi-step reasoning. On simpler domain-specific benchmarks like WixQA and IRPAPERS, medium effort already captures most of the gain over Hybrid Search. Teams evaluating retrieval quality for agentic or RAG workloads track benchmark comparisons like these on daily.dev.
What versions of the Weaviate agents library introduced the effort parameter for Search Mode?
The `effort` parameter for Search Mode was introduced in `weaviate-agents 1.8.0` for Python and `agents-typescript-client 1.7.0` for JavaScript/TypeScript. It accepts three tiers — medium, high, and ultrahigh — and can be set per request, letting applications balance accuracy against latency and cost depending on the query's importance. Developers shipping Weaviate upgrades watch for version-specific feature releases like this on daily.dev.
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