DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks

Jingxuan Han, Wei Liu, Mingyang Zhu, Youpeng Wang, Ziwen Wang, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Zheren Fu, Licheng Zhang, Zhendong Mao


Abstract
Search Agents (SAs) typically leverage large language models (LLMs) to support complex information-seeking tasks by autonomously exploring web sources and synthesizing information into comprehensive responses. For SAs evaluation, prior benchmarks mainly focus on specialized tasks that are unlikely to arise in real-world user scenarios. Moreover, their reliance on coarse task-level rubrics often limits evaluation interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyReport, an open-ended benchmark to evaluate SA capabilities on daily search tasks. It contains 150 open-ended tasks with 3,546 associated rubrics, capturing widely discussed and timely information demands of real-world users. Each task is decomposed into subtasks and evaluated with cascade rubrics across disentangled dimensions. Through cascade performance attribution and user-centric aggregation, we derive highly interpretable scores for each dimension, along with a user preference score. Our results on 17 agentic systems show that current systems still fall short of users’ expectations. DailyReport will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1071
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
22645–22675
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1071/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Jingxuan Han, Wei Liu, Mingyang Zhu, Youpeng Wang, Ziwen Wang, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Zheren Fu, Licheng Zhang, and Zhendong Mao. 2026. DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 22645–22675, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DailyReport: An Open-ended Benchmark for Evaluating Search Agents on Daily Search Tasks (Han et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1071.pdf