---
title: Hybrid search tuning
description: How filters, rerank, and top_k trade off relevance against latency and cost.
order: 2
---

`/v1/search` is a hybrid dense+sparse retrieval with an optional rerank pass — the defaults are reasonable for most queries, but three parameters are worth understanding before tuning them.

## `filters` narrows before ranking, not after

`filters.doc_type`, `filters.jurisdiction`, `filters.year_from`/`year_to`, and `filters.status` are applied as Qdrant payload conditions during retrieval, not as a post-hoc filter on results. Use them whenever you know the answer's shape in advance (e.g. "only in-force legislation") — it's strictly better than retrieving broadly and filtering client-side, since it lets the full `top_k` budget go to documents that could actually match.

## `rerank` costs latency, buys precision

With `rerank: true` (the default), the reranker scores `4 × top_k` candidates with a cross-encoder before returning the top `top_k` — noticeably more accurate ordering than raw hybrid-fusion scores alone, at the cost of an extra model call. If you're building an autocomplete-style experience where latency matters more than perfect ordering, consider `rerank: false`; for anything the answer quality of [`/v1/reason`](/docs/api-reference/reason) depends on, leave it on (reason always reranks internally regardless of what you'd pass to search).

## `top_k` vs. `include_text`

Raising `top_k` doesn't just return more results — with `include_text: true` (the default) it also means more 800-char snippets in the payload. If you're doing your own downstream reranking or just need IDs to feed into [`/v1/graph/traverse`](/docs/api-reference/graph-traverse), set `include_text: false` to cut response size without changing retrieval behavior at all.

## Reading `fusion` in the response

`fusion: "rrf"` means both dense and sparse vectors contributed to ranking; `fusion: "dense"` means the query fell back to dense-only (typically because the sparse/lexical side had nothing to match — very short or purely conceptual queries). This is informational, not something you control directly, but it's useful for debugging an unexpectedly ranked result.