Location-aware search with Apache Lucene and Solr

Whether looking for the nearest coffee shop on a GPS-enabled smartphone, nearby friends via a social-networking site, or all trucks within the city delivering a certain product, more and more people and businesses are using location-aware search services. Creating such services has often been the domain of expensive proprietary solutions and geospatial experts. Recently, however, the popular open source search library, Apache Lucene, and the powerful Lucene-powered search server, Apache Solr, have added spatial capabilities. Lucene and Solr committer Grant Ingersoll walks you through the basics of spatial search and shows you how to leverage its capabilities to power your next location-aware application.