Meta Data Filtering Sequence Documentation Issue

[shivaborusu]

I believe the search is performed after the metadata filtering is done, here is line found on your website (Refer the image)

The Text "We can narrow down the results further by filtering by payload. Let’s find the closest results that include “London”."

[timvisee]

I don't see an issue in this text.

Could you elaborate once more on what you might think is problematic? Or, even better, what would you suggest to show instead?

[shivaborusu]

Hi Timvisee,

Please correct me if my understanding is wrong about "metadata filtering is done before the dense search is performed".
The documentation suggests, once the dense retrieval is performed then to narrow down the results further metadata filtering is applied.

[timvisee]

Qdrant normally filters during HNSW traversal, which means it filters during the search stage.

We have an article on it here: https://qdrant.tech/articles/filtrable-hnsw/

I don't agree that the above

We can narrow down the results further by filtering by payload.

suggests that it does post filtering. To me it suggests we can add filters to eliminate results, which is effectively what is happening.

[shivaborusu]

Okay, may be that's my misunderstanding. The reason I read it that way is, an example before this line suggests the code without filters and then when I see this following statement which indicates "further filtering" I assumed we are applying filters to the search results above. If that's not how you read it, please feel free to close this. Thanks for clarifying.