Building a Location-Aware Discovery Engine: Why “Nearby” Isn't Just Distance

"Nearby" sounds like a simple feature. Calculate the distance between the user and every location. Sort by distance. Done. In practice, that's not enough. A useful local discovery engine has to understand more than geography. That's one of the problems we're tackling with LeeX. The basic version A traditional nearby query might look like: User location ↓ Calculate distance ↓ Sort ascending ↓ Return results If Restaurant A is 500 meters away and Restaurant B is 2 kilometers away, Restaurant A wins. But what if Restaurant A is permanently closed? What if Restaurant B is much more relevant to the user's category? What if Restaurant B is currently featured? What if thousands of people have recently interacted with Restaurant B? Distance alone doesn't capture usefulness. Our discovery model We're thinking about discovery as a combination of signals: Discovery Score = Distance + Relevance + Activity + Popularity + Featured status + Availability + User context The exact weighting can evolve. The important part is that proximity is one signal, not the entire algorithm. Distance still matters We don't want to ignore geography. For local discovery, distance is extremely important. A user looking for a restaurant probably cares whether it is: 500 m 1 km 2 km 5 km 10 km That's why LeeX can expose radius-based discovery. But distance should normally be combined with other information. Category context Suppose someone opens LeeX and selects: Restaurants The discovery engine should not treat every listing equally. The system already knows the user's current intent. That gives us a stronger query: Nearby + Restaurant + Open + Relevant rather than: Nearby + Everything Featured listings LeeX also has a promotion layer. Featured listings can receive additional visibility across relevant discovery surfaces. But promotional ranking needs to be handled carefully. A featured listing shouldn't necessarily make every other result useless. Instead, we can think of featured placement as an ad