Local Lucene is a project designed to add local search to Lucene. Basically, you add spatial coordinates to index fields. Then you need to decide, based on your index structure, whether it is better to first search according to text matches, and then filter by geographic location or vice versa. Lucene in Action provides an example of a spatial result filter. the upcoming second edition is likely to have more in that direction. See also the wiki page of LocalSolr .