Fast vs. Turbo: choosing a Parallel Search mode for agent loops

Parallel Search offers four modes with a latency-to-quality tradeoff: Turbo at roughly 200 ms, Fast at 700 ms, Basic at 1 second, and Advanced at 3 seconds. Turbo and Fast each cost $1 per 1,000 requests and are suited to different workloads: Turbo prioritizes responsiveness for English or Japanese voice, chat, and high-volume lookup use cases, while Fast is recommended for most interactive agents because it performs better on difficult multi-hop questions at the same request price. Benchmarks cited in the guide show relatively small quality differences on simple factual retrieval but a larger Fast advantage on BrowseComp-style research tasks, while Turbo’s lower per-call latency can compound in sequential search loops, though parallel calls and model processing time often reduce its total impact. Basic and Advanced cost $5 per 1,000 requests and are intended respectively for requests needing longer source excerpts and background research requiring deeper retrieval, with Advanced also serving as the API default when no mode is specified. The guide recommends choosing modes per call, using escalation strategies such as Fast for routine searches and Advanced for weak or contradictory results, measuring performance from the user’s own region, and explicitly setting modes because defaults vary across the API, CLI, and MCP interfaces.

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