Search & AI Summary Settings

Two pages in the admin area hold the instance-wide defaults for search ranking and for AI summaries. Since v0.15.0 these values are stored in the database and edited there, under Settings → Search and Settings → AI Summary, instead of in the search: and ai_summary: sections of config.yaml.

A saved change applies to the next request. No restart is needed.

Upgrading from an earlier release with tuned values in config.yaml? Read Upgrading first: the sections are imported once and ignored afterwards.

Who can open them

Only an instance admin. The pages live at /admin/settings/search and /admin/settings/ai-summary: open the admin area, then Settings → Search or Settings → AI Summary. Everyone else, team owners included, is sent back to the app’s home page, and the API behind the pages answers 404.

Search

The search ranking defaults every team without its own search settings ranks with, plus one value that applies to every team. What the ranking values do is explained in Search Settings.

Ranking defaults

Field	What it does	Allowed	Built-in default
Recency ranking	Re-rank results by how recently they were created and updated, not by relevance alone.	on / off	off
Relevance weight	Weight of semantic/keyword relevance.	0 or more	0.5
Created-recency weight	Weight of how recently the resource was created.	0 or more	0.3
Updated-recency weight	Weight of how recently the resource was updated.	0 or more	0.2
Half-life (days)	How quickly recency fades: after this many days a result’s recency score halves.	above 0, at most 36500	90

The three weights are normalized by their sum, so only their ratio matters. They must not all be zero.

Instance-wide

Field	What it does	Allowed	Built-in default
Candidate cap	How many matches are pulled and re-ranked per search. With recency ranking on, results beyond it are not reachable by pagination.	1–5000	200

The candidate cap applies to every team, including teams with their own search settings. Raising it increases memory and latency for every ranked query on the instance.

AI Summary

An AI summary reads the top results of a search and writes a summary of them with one of the team’s own model providers. This page holds the defaults a team starts from and the server budgets every team shares.

Team defaults

Field	What it does	Allowed	Built-in default
Enable AI Summary	Summarize the top search results with the team’s model provider.	on / off	on
Results to read	How many top-ranked results a summary reads.	1–10	5
Style	How detailed a summary is.	Concise, Balanced, Detailed	Balanced
Response length (tokens)	Upper bound on how much a summary may write.	1–32768	800

Advanced / server budgets

Field	What it does	Allowed	Built-in default
Per-document budget (chars)	How many characters of each result a summary reads.	1 or more	8000
Total context budget (chars)	The character budget of one summary’s whole context.	at least the per-document budget	32000
Request timeout (ms)	How long the server waits for the model, in milliseconds.	1 or more	60000

The three server budgets apply to every team, including teams with their own AI summary settings.

Whatever these defaults say, a team can only use AI summaries once it has at least one model provider of its own. There is no instance-level model provider.

Instance defaults and team overrides

A team either has its own complete profile or none at all. There is no per-field blend.

• No profile of its own: the team uses the instance defaults on these pages, and follows along when you change them.
• Its own profile: once a team saves its own search settings (see Search Settings) or its own AI summary settings (see AI Summary), every value in that profile is the team’s. A later change to the instance defaults does not reach it.

Search and AI summary are separate profiles: a team can override one and still inherit the other.

Four values are instance-only. They are not part of any team profile, so they reach every team, overriding or not:

• the search Candidate cap;
• the AI summary Per-document budget (chars);
• the AI summary Total context budget (chars);
• the AI summary Request timeout (ms).

Each page shows how many teams override its settings, so you can tell how far a change to the defaults will reach.

Fixed limits

Two limits are built into VibeXP and are the same for the instance defaults and for every team:

• a summary reads at most 10 results;
• a summary’s response length is at most 32768 tokens.

No instance setting narrows them. A team may choose any value up to these limits whatever the instance defaults are, because a summary runs on the team’s own model provider.

Built-in defaults and resetting

Until something is saved, a page shows the badge Using built-in defaults and the values in the tables above are in effect. After the first save the badge reads Customized, with who last changed the settings and when.

Reset to defaults removes the stored values, so the built-in defaults apply again. The confirmation dialog lists them before you confirm. The button is shown only while the page is Customized. Resetting one page does not touch the other.

A leftover config section is imported again after a reset

The config.yaml import described in Upgrading runs at every start and only checks whether settings are stored. If you reset a page while a non-default search: or ai_summary: section is still in your configuration, the next restart imports that section again. Remove the section first.

If someone else saved the same page while you were editing, your save is rejected and nothing is overwritten. Reload the page to see the current values, then make your change again.

Change history

Each page ends with a Change history card: one entry per change, with who made it, when, and the before and after value of each field that changed. An entry is one of:

• Saved: an instance admin saved the page.
• Reset to defaults: an instance admin reset it.
• Imported: the server imported the section from config.yaml at startup. The entry reads Imported from config.yaml in place of a person’s name.

API

The pages are backed by instance-admin endpoints. Non-admin and unauthenticated requests receive 404.

GET|PUT|DELETE /api/v1/admin/settings/search
GET            /api/v1/admin/settings/search/audit
GET|PUT|DELETE /api/v1/admin/settings/ai-summary
GET            /api/v1/admin/settings/ai-summary/audit

PUT replaces the whole set of values: a body that omits a field is rejected with 400. Pass expected_version to have the save rejected with 409 when the settings changed since you read them. DELETE is the reset.

Related

• Search Settings: what the ranking values do, and the team’s own Search Settings page.
• Embedding & Model Providers: the team’s own AI Summary settings.
• Upgrading: what happens to the search: and ai_summary: config sections in v0.15.0.