← All questions
Retrieval & EmbeddingsMedium· Hybrid Search· Reciprocal Rank Fusion· Retrieval Depth

In a hybrid search system using RRF, what is the impact...

When using RRF, the rank of a document determines its fused score. Increasing the retrieval depth admits more documents, but these documents will typically have low ranks in the individual lists. Consequently, they will appear at the bottom of the fused list and will not affect the top-ten results used by a generator. If the goal is to make deeper documents matter, one must increase the RRF constant ‘k’, though this changes the crossover point for all queries.

Code playground (Python)