What should I use for a benchmark dataset to test a search model?

It depends on what kind of “search model” you mean, but the safest answer is: use a dataset that matches your search task, and evaluate on a standard benchmark when possible.

Good benchmark choices by task

1) General semantic search / passage retrieval

• BEIR is the most common benchmark suite.
  • It includes many datasets across domains and query types.
  • Good for measuring robustness beyond one narrow dataset.
• Common individual datasets from BEIR:
  • MS MARCO (very standard for web passage retrieval)
  • TREC-COVID (domain-specific)
  • NQ / Natural Questions
  • HotpotQA
  • FiQA, ArguAna, SCIDOCS, etc.

2) Web search / first-stage retrieval

• MS MARCO Passage Ranking
  • Very widely used.
  • Good if your model retrieves relevant passages for open-domain search.

3) Question answering retrieval / open-domain QA

• Natural Questions
• TriviaQA
• HotpotQA
  These test whether the search model can retrieve evidence for answering questions.

4) Document retrieval / long-document search

• TREC Robust
• BEIR document-level tasks
• CLEF / TREC ad hoc retrieval datasets

5) Code search

• CodeSearchNet
• CoSQA
• MTEB code-search tasks if you want a broader embedding benchmark

6) Multilingual search

• Mr. TyDi
• MIRACL
• mMARCO
• XTREME / MTEB multilingual retrieval tasks

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If you want one practical recommendation

If you’re building a general-purpose text search model, start with:

1. MS MARCO for in-domain performance
2. BEIR for broader generalization testing
3. Optionally MTEB retrieval tasks if you’re evaluating embedding-based search

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Metrics to use

For search benchmarks, common metrics are:

• Recall@k
• MRR@k
• nDCG@k
• MAP

For most retrieval tasks:

• Recall@10 and MRR@10 are common.
• nDCG@10 is useful when graded relevance matters.

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Rule of thumb

• If you want one benchmark only: use MS MARCO.
• If you want a better overall evaluation: use BEIR.
• If you want industry-style embedding/search evaluation: use MTEB plus a domain-specific dataset.

If you tell me:

1. whether your search is web / docs / QA / code / multilingual, and
2. whether it’s keyword, dense, or hybrid search,
   I can recommend the best exact dataset(s).