Have you ever opened Yelp or Google Maps to find a place to eat—and instantly seen a list of nearby restaurants? It feels like magic, but there’s some smart tech behind the scenes making it happen.
Let’s break it down simply.
🔧 Two Key Services Make It Work:
Business Service
This handles all the restaurant information—adding new ones, updating details, and showing you things like menus, photos, reviews, and hours.
Location-Based Service (LBS)
This is what actually finds the restaurants near you based on your current location and how far you're willing to travel.
🗺️ So How Does It Find What's "Nearby"?
Every restaurant has a location stored as latitude and longitude in the database.
But if the system had to check the distance between you and every restaurant, that would be slow—especially in big cities.
To speed things up, many systems use something called Geohashing.
🧩 What Is Geohashing?
Think of the Earth like a big grid, cut into squares. Geohashing divides the planet into small sections by slicing it up repeatedly—like cutting a pizza into smaller and smaller pieces.
Each piece of this grid gets a unique code, or "geohash," based on its location. This makes it easier to group restaurants that are close to each other.
So when you're searching, instead of checking every restaurant one by one, the app just checks the ones that fall into the same or nearby grids.
It’s like narrowing down your search to just a few neighborhoods, rather than the whole city.
⚠️ Why It’s Not Always Perfect
Geohashing isn’t flawless. Some grids might have tons of restaurants (like downtown areas), while others might be nearly empty (like near the ocean or countryside).
That’s why large platforms often add even more advanced techniques on top of geohashing to fine-tune the results and make the search even faster and more accurate.
So next time you see a list of restaurants pop up instantly, you’ll know — it’s not magic. It’s smart design, clever math, and a whole lot of optimization working quietly in the background. 🍔📍