Vespa Newsletter, February 2026

The February 2026 edition of the Vespa newsletter highlights several updates aimed at enhancing retrieval quality, ranking flexibility, and developer productivity, offering businesses improved relevance and reduced operational overhead. New features include the Vespa.ai Playground, which serves as a GitHub space for sharing projects and tools, and the Vespa Kubernetes Operator, which facilitates secure Vespa deployments outside of Vespa Cloud. Enhancements such as faster result rendering with the CBOR format, Pyvespa 1.0 with improved HTTP performance, and a hybrid search relevance evaluation tool are introduced to optimize performance and efficiency. Vespa now also supports configurable linguistics per field and a new "switch" operator for ranking expressions, simplifying complex processes. Additionally, Vespa is now available on the GCP Marketplace, and the onboarding experience is streamlined with features like data feeding and query running directly in the Vespa Console. New content and learning resources, including articles, webinars, and podcasts, are available to help teams stay updated with developments in AI, search, and large-scale retrieval systems.