I don't understand your question, how you want to say in a network or in a country specific search engine? Please clear it then i am able to give answer.
I have a database of businesses and their addresses (street city state zip) and I need to figure out how to do a distance based search.
Do you mean you want to create a website that offers searching as a service for your local shops and business?
I am the same as everyone else a bit confused in what you are asking but rather than say a local search why dont you make a local directory it would be alot easier.
There are a few variables you might want to take into account when creating a search engine based on geo-location specifics: 1) Location of the user: - the actual IP of the user (this might be highly inaccurate though) - opt-in information provided by the user - i.e. you ask them for which location/niche they'd like to find the best providers/suppliers and they give you the straight forward answer; you'd better allow searching both by "word" (city+state, neighbourhood, etc) and by "ZIP" 2) Location relevancy (prominence) of the place: - content on the business listing page - address, ZIP, words used in the description field, tags, etc - links to the business listing page (both external and internal, if you create the structure of your website well enough the internal might be good enough) - you might consider using other factors when ranking pages, such as number of ratings/reviews (if you have such), average rating, completeness of profile (if the content is user generated), etc Cheers, Nyagoslav NGS Marketing
Are you talking about local contact search website like justdial, so you need to contact, survey agencies those store people information and sell to third party.
In order to to build local search engine, you can use Lucene or Solr and Nutch. You can read "Bewsia - Micro Search Engine for Desktop" project for the way to build search engine.
I think you are asking about local search engine optimization. Create Map using the local address and do Local Optimization to your map listing