Location-based data search is a very important requirement nowadays, such as searching for distances from a place, searching a house within a radius, and so on. Solr supports searching for location-based data called spatial or geospatial searches.

This can be implemented by indexing a field in each document that contains a geographical point (a latitude and longitude); and then at query time, we can find and sort documents by distance from a geolocation (latitude and longitude). The matching listings (results) can be displayed on an interactive map, in which we can zoom in/out and move the map center point to find nearby listings using spatial search. Like latitude and longitude, Solr also allows us to index geographical shapes (polygons), which are used to find a document that intersects geographical regions. Spatial search implemented by indexing a field (latitude and longitude) helps to search from a specific point, while implementing by indexing geographical shapes helps to search all documents within a given range. Solr also supports returning the distances of matching documents in a response. We can also apply sorting on distances to provide more useful results to the user.