> Explore Qdrant's agent skills catalog at https://skills.qdrant.tech/
> Search the documentation at https://skills.qdrant.tech/search?query=your+query+here
> Use this file to discover all available pages: https://qdrant.tech/llms.txt

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  <img class="date-icon" src="/icons/outline/date-blue.svg" alt="Calendar" />  Module 3 
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# Fusion Strategies

The difference between the two strategies is what each does with magnitude. RRF knows only that a document came first, second, or third, so a runaway top match and a photo finish look identical to it. DBSF rescales each retriever's scores onto a comparable range before combining them, which keeps that information at the cost of depending on how those scores are distributed.

| Strategy | How it works | When to use it |
|----------|--------------|----------------|
| RRF (Reciprocal Rank Fusion) | Merges by rank position, discarding raw scores | The default, and the safe choice whenever the two score scales differ, which is nearly always |
| DBSF (Distribution-Based Score Fusion) | Normalizes each retriever's score distribution, then combines | When the size of the gaps between scores carries information worth keeping |

Neither reliably beats the other, so treat the choice as an evaluation result rather than a preference: start with RRF and switch only after measuring on a set of queries with known-good answers. The [Hybrid Queries documentation](https://qdrant.tech/documentation/search/hybrid-queries/index.md) covers both, along with their tuning parameters.