# Meilisearch v1.8.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Meilisearch (https://meilisearch.com)
- **Version:** v1.8.0
- **Released:** May 06, 2024
- **Impact Score:** 7/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Source flagged
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/meilisearch/updates/v1.8.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Meilisearch v1.8.0. Source highlight: Meilisearch v1.8 introduces new changes and optimizations related to the Hybrid search with the addition of new models and embedders like REST embedders and the Ollama model. This version also focuses on stability by adding more security around the search requests. Finally, we introduce the negative

## Breaking Changes & Deprecations
- This release introduces a few [changes to hybrid search](https://meilisearch.notion.site/v1-8-AI-search-API-usage-135552d6e85a4a52bc7109be82aeca42).): a new `distribution` embedder setting, support for two new embedder sources, and breaking changes to hybrid and semantic search ranking score.
- ⚠️ Breaking changes: `_semanticScore` To increase search response times and reduce bandwidth usage:

## New Features
- For hybrid or semantic search requests, add a `semanticHitCount` field at the top of the search response indicating the number of hits originating from the semantic search (#4548) @dureuill
- `-escape` returns any document that does not contain `escape`
- `-escape room` returns documents containing `room` but not `escape`
- `-"on demand"` returns any document that does not contain `"on demand"`
- Prometheus experimental feature: add `status` code label to the HTTP request counter (#4373) @rohankmr414
- Add `\t` as recognized separator

## Improvements
- Hide the API key in settings and task queue (#4533) @dureuill
- Return keyword search results even in case of a failure of the embedding when performing hybrid searches (#4548) @dureuill
- Increase indexing speed when updating settings (#4504) @ManyTheFish
- The `sortFacetValuesBy` setting now impacts the `/facet-search` route (#4476) @Kerollmops
- Tokenizer improvements by bumping charabia to 0.8.8 (#4511) @6543
- Support markdown formatted code blocks

## Bug Fixes
- Update search logs: do not display `hits` in the search output for DEBUG log level (#4580) @irevoire
- Fix crash when putting empty separator (#4574) @ManyTheFish
- Stop crashing when panic occurs in thread pool (#4593) @Kerollmops
- Always show facet numbers in alpha order in the facet distribution (#4581) @Kerollmops
- Prometheus experimental feature: fix the HTTP request duration histogram bucket boundaries to follow the OpenTelemetry spec (#4530) @rohankmr414
- Hybrid search experimental feature: fix an error on Windows when generating embeddings (#4549) @dureuill