RerankersSearch and RAG

BCEmbedding (Youdao)

An embedding-plus-reranker pair for knowledge bases. The card lists English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean — Russian is not among the stated languages.

The last open version came out in Dec 2023. The family has not been updated for a long time: the model still works, but do not expect fixes or new sizes.

Developer
NetEase Youdao, China
First release
Dec 2023
Latest release
Dec 2023
Sizes
about 280M
License
Commercial use allowedApache 2.0
Russian
Not supported
Running
On your own serverAlso runs without a GPU
Industries
Customer support, Documents and accounting, Education, Software development
Deploy on your server Hugging Face GitHub

What it does

  • Search across a knowledge base and reference materials
  • Reordering retrieved passages
  • Picking answers for a support chatbot

Where it is used

Customer supportDocument managementEducation and staff training

Hardware requirements

LaptopLaptop or regular PC, up to 8 GB of VRAM — smaller versions
fits
1 GPUOne GPU with 16–80 GB — mid-size versions
no versions
ClusterServer with several GPUs — flagship versions
no versions

Versions

  1. bce-embedding-base_v1 и bce-reranker-base_v1

How to run it

On your own serverWeights are downloaded from Hugging Face and served with vLLM (load and API) or llama.cpp (modest hardware). The model then runs in a closed network with no per-request fees.Hugging Face
How much hardware you needCalculate the VRAM for the model size, context length and number of concurrent requests.Open the hardware calculator

I can set this up end to end: pick the model size, deploy it on your server and connect it to your systems.

Frequently asked questions

Can BCEmbedding (Youdao) be used in a commercial project?

Yes. License: Apache 2.0. It allows commercial use, but it is still worth having a lawyer review the license before launch.

What hardware does BCEmbedding (Youdao) need?

At minimum: Laptop or regular PC, up to 8 GB of VRAM — smaller versions. Some versions also run on an ordinary CPU, without a GPU. You can calculate the exact VRAM for your model size and context in the hardware calculator.

Does BCEmbedding (Youdao) support Russian?

No. The developer documentation lists the supported languages and Russian is not among them.

Where can I download BCEmbedding (Youdao) and what does it cost?

The BCEmbedding (Youdao) weights are open and free to download. You only pay for the hardware it runs on and for the setup. Source links are at the bottom of this page.

How I deploy it for clients

  1. SelectionI pick the model size for your task and hardware and test it on your examples.
  2. DeploymentI deploy it on your server or in a closed network and provide an API.
  3. Fine-tuningI fine-tune it on your data (LoRA) or connect a knowledge base — whichever is cheaper for the task.
  4. IntegrationI connect it to your CRM, ERP, bot, website or team chat and set up monitoring.

Similar models

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DetailsSearch and RAGGTEAlibaba · ChinaCommercial use allowed

Alibaba embeddings and rerankers for search: from tiny to 7B based on Qwen2. There is a multilingual mGTE version with long context.

DetailsRerankersJina RerankerJina AI · GermanyCommercial use with conditions

Strong multilingual rerankers; m0 also ranks pages as images (scans, slides). The latest versions are open for non-commercial use only.

Details

Source: huggingface.co/maidalun1020/bce-reranker-base_v1. Data checked against the model card on 22 Sep 2026. Have a lawyer review the license before commercial launch.