Reflections on
Elasticsearch.

Location-Aware Search with Elasticsearch Geo Queries

Combining full-text relevance with geo_distance, bounding box filtering, and spatial decay scoring

Elasticsearch's geospatial capabilities let you ask questions that pure text search cannot answer: not just 'find documents about coffee' but 'find the most relevant coffee shop within 500 metres of where I am standing, weighted by recency and rating'. This post walks through how to build that kind of query from first principles.