# Location search where the index is the program.
Canonical: https://siua.io/labs/locate/
Playground: https://siua.io/labs/locate/playground/
High-performance address and POI search for teams that need more than a generic geocoder. Multiple intents. Custom profiles. Payload-complete responses. Very fast.
Status: Live today: address exact, typeahead, fuzzy, POI search, city/airport/feature lookup, nearby, reverse, coordinate auto-intent, destination priors, and portable profile creation.
## Overview
The market gives you two bad choices. You can rent a black-box geocoder that is easy until the day you need to understand why it ranked something the way it did. Or you can wire a general search engine into a location stack and spend your life rebuilding the semantics yourself: reverse lookup, nearby lookup, chain intent, destination priors, profile biasing, and complete payload assembly.

We wanted something else: a production location service that already knows the surfaces the product needs. Exact address, typeahead, fuzzy address, POI name/category/type/chain, cities, airports, landmarks, reverse address, nearby POIs, and coordinate auto-intent. Not ID-only benchmark paths. Real responses with labels, coordinates, typed payloads, and route metadata.

The category shift is architectural. We move the work to build time, lay out the runtime as direct binary artifacts, and let request handling become offset math over memory-mapped files. The index is the program. That is why it is fast, and why it feels different from the rest of the market.
## Who It Is For
- Teams building location-heavy product surfaces
- Travel, logistics, and local discovery engineers
- Search and relevancy teams that need explainable routing
- Companies outgrowing generic geocoder APIs
## How It Works
- Compile the production surface: Build-time jobs emit memory-mapped artifacts for address, POI, entity, spatial, and personalization paths, so runtime avoids generalized search-engine machinery.
- Route intent immediately: The server recognizes multiple search intents — including coordinate auto-intent — and sends each request to a purpose-built path instead of making one generic index pretend to do everything.
- Return payload-complete results: Responses already carry labels, coordinates, nested address or POI data, match metadata, and route names. Not just IDs you have to hydrate elsewhere.
- Bias results with portable profiles: Profile tokens encode preferred categories, chains, examples, origin, destination, and suppressed interests so personalization stays explicit and fast.
## Product Notes

### What the playground exposes
Getting started
The public preview mirrors the production HTTP API surfaces and keeps the routing decisions visible.

- Search, nearby, reverse, profile builder, raw API, and metrics tabs
- Mode selector for search, typeahead, POI, city, airport, and feature intents
- Route, latency, result count, and raw JSON returned on every request

### Move the work to build time
Why it is fast
The runtime serves memory-mapped artifacts with preencoded payloads and direct lookup rows instead of reconstructing results out of a generic engine at request time.

- HTTP JSON measured at roughly 122K-172K QPS on the 10% production-shaped artifact
- Binary protocol measured at 715K–1.53M QPS by route
- Fastest batched binary paths reached 16.9M-21.4M QPS

### Profile tokens, not hidden magic
Personalization
The profile builder lets clients express positive and negative intent without turning the server into an opaque ranking machine.

- Preferred and suppressed categories, POI types, and chains
- Origin and destination context for destination priors
- Prior examples and preferred result types packed into a portable token

### Built for production surfaces
Deployment
The server exposes HTTP JSON, binary protocol, and batch transports — each optimized for a different throughput tier, from public API to internal high-frequency pipelines.

- Address, POI, city, airport, feature, nearby, reverse, and profile surfaces
- HTTP JSON, binary protocol, and batch (JSON and binary) transports
- Public playground live at locate-api.labs.siua.io
## Roadmap
- Production HTTP JSON API with multiple intents: done
- Portable profile token builder: done
- Nearby and reverse lookup surfaces: done
- Destination-aware POI ranking: done
- Public playground on locate-api.labs.siua.io: in-progress
- Deployed full-artifact benchmark refresh: in-progress
- Lower-overhead colocated transport beyond sockets: planned
- Broader ranking and profiling controls: planned
The Labs playground is the public face of a production runtime. If you need address and POI search with explicit intent routing, profile control, and real payloads, email us. We will tell you what is ready, what is still moving, and whether it belongs in your stack.