The nearest hotel problem

Let's assume that we are at a particular point where the latitude is 1.234 and the longitude is 2.132. We need to find the nearest restaurants to this location.

For this purpose, the function_score query is the best option. We can use the decay (Gauss) functionality of the function score query to achieve this:

curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9200/restaurants/_search' -d '{
  "query": {
    "function_score": {
      "functions": [
        {
          "gauss": {
            "location": {
              "scale": "1km",
              "origin": [
                1.231,
                1.012
              ]
            }
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}'

Here, we tell Elasticsearch to give a higher score to the restaurants that are nearby the referral point we gave it. The closer it is, the higher is the importance.