Part 3: Optimizing Qdrant Hybrid Search: Combining Dense, Sparse Vectors & Hard Filters
← Previous Chapter: Part 2: Ingestion & Atomic Catalog Chunking | Series Hub | Next Chapter: Part 4: Active RAG & Strict Tool Calling → Prerequisite: Read Part 2: Data Ingestion & E-commerce Chunking: Bringing Product Catalogs to AI to understand the Atomic Chunking model and vector point schema. Answer-first: Hybrid search in Qdrant fuses dense semantic embeddings with sparse lexical tokens via Reciprocal Rank Fusion, boosting Top-10 catalog retrieval recall from 78.2% to 96.8%. Executing payload index pre-filtering directly within HNSW graph traversals enforces strict brand, category, and price boundaries in sub-2ms, while scalar quantization reduces cluster RAM consumption by 75% without sacrificing product discovery relevance. ...