Score: 2

WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking

Published: August 11, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2508.07999v1

By: Ryan Wong , Jiawei Wang , Junjie Zhao and more

BigTech Affiliations: ByteDance

Potential Business Impact:

Tests if computer helpers can find lots of facts.

Plain English Summary

Imagine you need to gather a lot of information for a project, like finding all the reviews for a specific product or collecting data on a historical event. This new tool helps computers do that tedious searching for you, freeing up your time. It's like having a super-fast research assistant, but right now, these assistants aren't very good at handling big, complex searches. This work creates a way to test how well they can do these big jobs, so we can make them much better and save everyone a lot of time on research.

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberate humans from this tedious work. However, the capability of these agents to perform such "wide-context" collection reliably and completely remains largely unevaluated due to a lack of suitable benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce WideSearch, a new benchmark engineered to evaluate agent reliability on these large-scale collection tasks. The benchmark features 200 manually curated questions (100 in English, 100 in Chinese) from over 15 diverse domains, grounded in real user queries. Each task requires agents to collect large-scale atomic information, which could be verified one by one objectively, and arrange it into a well-organized output. A rigorous five-stage quality control pipeline ensures the difficulty, completeness, and verifiability of the dataset. We benchmark over 10 state-of-the-art agentic search systems, including single-agent, multi-agent frameworks, and end-to-end commercial systems. Most systems achieve overall success rates near 0\%, with the best performer reaching just 5\%. However, given sufficient time, cross-validation by multiple human testers can achieve a near 100\% success rate. These results demonstrate that present search agents have critical deficiencies in large-scale information seeking, underscoring urgent areas for future research and development in agentic search. Our dataset, evaluation pipeline, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://widesearch-seed.github.io/

Country of Origin
🇨🇳 China

Page Count
29 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Computation and Language