landing_page/qdrant-landing/content/documentation/tutorials-and-examples/cloud-inference-hybrid-search.md

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Using Cloud Inference to Build Hybrid Search	35

Using Cloud Inference with Qdrant for Vector Search

In this tutorial, we'll walkthrough building a hybrid semantic search engine using Qdrant Cloud's built-in inference capabilities. You'll learn how to:

• Automatically embed your data using cloud Inference without needing to run local models,
• Combine dense semantic embeddings with sparse BM25 keywords, and
• Perform hybrid search using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to retrieve the most relevant results.

Install Qdrant Client

pip install qdrant-client datasets

Initialize the Client

Initialize the Qdrant client after creating a Qdrant Cloud account and a dedicated paid cluster. Set cloud_inference to True to enable cloud inference.

{{< code-snippet path="/documentation/headless/snippets/cloud-inference/vector-search/initialize-client/" >}}

Create a Collection

Qdrant stores vectors and associated metadata in collections. A collection requires vector parameters to be set during creation. In this case, let's set up a collection using BM25 for sparse vectors and all-minilm-l6-v2 for dense vectors. BM25 uses the Inverse Document Frequency to reduce the weight of common terms that appear in many documents while boosting the importance of rare terms that are more discriminative for retrieval. Qdrant will handle the calculations of the IDF term if we enable that in the configuration of the bm25_sparse_vector named sparse vector.

{{< code-snippet path="/documentation/headless/snippets/cloud-inference/vector-search/create-collection/" >}}

Add Data

Now you can add sample documents, their associated metadata, and a point id for each. Here's a sample of the miriad/miriad-4.4M dataset:

qa_id	paper_id	question	year	venue	specialty	passage_text
38_77498699_0_1	77498699	What are the clinical features of relapsing polychondritis?	2006	Internet Journal of Otorhinolaryngology	Rheumatology	A 45-year-old man presented with painful swelling...
38_77498699_0_2	77498699	What treatments are available for relapsing polychondritis?	2006	Internet Journal of Otorhinolaryngology	Rheumatology	Patient showed improvement after treatment with...
38_88124321_0_3	88124321	How is Takayasu arteritis diagnosed?	2015	Journal of Autoimmune Diseases	Rheumatology	A 32-year-old woman with fatigue and limb pain...

We won't ingest all the entries from the dataset, but for demo purposes, just take the first hundred ones:

{{< code-snippet path="/documentation/headless/snippets/cloud-inference/vector-search/upload-data/" >}}

Set Up Input Query

Create a sample query:

{{< code-snippet path="/documentation/headless/snippets/cloud-inference/vector-search/create-sample-query/" >}}

Run Vector Search

Here, you will ask a question that will allow you to retrieve semantically relevant results. The final results are obtained by reranking using Reciprocal Rank Fusion.

{{< code-snippet path="/documentation/headless/snippets/cloud-inference/vector-search/run-vector-search/" >}}

The semantic search engine will retrieve the most similar result in order of relevance.

[ScoredPoint(id='9968a760-fbb5-4d91-8549-ffbaeb3ebdba', 
version=0, score=14.545895, 
payload={'text': "Relapsing Polychondritis is a rare..."}, 
vector=None, shard_key=None, order_value=None)]