query points payload key prioritization

[RemainIndoors1]

Hi, Good Morning. Let's say I have a collection in Qdrant that contains only points with payloads that each contain 3 keys. For example, timestamp, name and topic. When querying for those points, I know it's possible to order by timestamp and filter by a specific key - is it also possible to prioritize a given key value?

for example, if I had the following 4 points:

payload: {"timestamp": "2025-12-1 10:00:00", "name": "Paul", "topic": "hotrods"}
payload: {"timestamp": "2025-12-1 11:00:00", "name": "Paul", "topic": "fishing"}
payload: {"timestamp": "2025-12-1 12:00:00", "name": "James", "topic": "hotrods"}
payload: {"timestamp": "2025-12-1 12:30:00", "name": "Paul", "topic": "hotrods"}

Let's say I want to query for all points where the topic is hotrods, but I want to make sure A) the Paul results come back first without excluding the James results, and B) if there are multiple Paul Results, that they're ordered in reverse chronological order.

so, the results would be as follows:

payload: {"timestamp": "2025-12-1 12:30:00", "name": "Paul", "topic": "hotrods"}
payload: {"timestamp": "2025-12-1 10:00:00", "name": "Paul", "topic": "hotrods"}
payload: {"timestamp": "2025-12-1 12:00:00", "name": "James", "topic": "hotrods"}

I know I can specify a filter to limit the results to only hotrods, and order by timestamp as well, but Is there a way to write a query with Qdrant to prioritize a value like that? I've been looking through the documentation, but maybe I'm just overlooking how you could accomplish that? or maybe that doesn't really make sense as a concept with the name in the payload? 🤔

Any help would be appreciated.

[generall]

Currenly filters do not sort points. You might be able to achieve something like this only on re-ranking stage with formula https://qdrant.tech/documentation/concepts/hybrid-queries/#score-boosting

[RemainIndoors1]

Gotcha. Thank you for the info