February 16, 2024About a month ago I began work a new geocoder (demo), or search engine for places and addresses. I wanted to make something very inexpensive to run. A big barrier to entry for hosting a planet-scale headway instance is the geocoder. Right now we’re using Pelias which is great at what it does, but runs on ElasticSearch which doesn’t do well on <8GB of RAM. I’ve been poking at this problem off and on for years, and didn’t expect to get anything working, but much to my surprise thi...