Sometimes it's favorable to allow users to simply show the locations nearest to their location, without specifying a numeric radius.
MetaLocator allows this by providing a special radius called Nearest.
Nearest works by returning all results, regardless of distance in order of closest first. All distance-based searches return locations ordered by closest first; Nearest differs by not limiting the results at a specific numeric distance.
Enable Nearest by editing the "Include Nearest" option, found under Form Settings. You can also specify Nearest as the default radius as shown here:
Nearest works well when used in combination with a lowered default number of search results. The options involved in this figure are found under Data Settings as shown below:
The first option highlighted above controls the number of results displayed by default. When using Nearest, reduce this figure to an appropriate number of search results.
In the above configuration, with 500 results per page, and a radius of Nearest, if a search is performed 500 results will be returned for any search ordered by their distance from the user's search. In this example we show the search results for Nearest to 60001 (Chicago, IL, USA) with a database of 77 locations.
Reducing the 500 figure to 10 or even 5 yields a much more useful result for the user.
To effectively reduce the number of results per page, reduce the 500 figure found in Maximum number of Results per Page of Search Results to 5. Then add the number 5 to the List of Available Numbers of Results Per Page. This setting updates the values that appear in this list to include the new value.
The above pagination control is not displayed if the total number of results is less than the Maximum Number of Results per Page of Search Results.
The same search above, replacing the 500 figures with 5, yields the following:
How Nearest works with Prioritization
MetaLocator has features which allow the prioritization of certain results when they are in the scope of a given search. Since Nearest brings all locations in scope, prioritized results will always be shown first when used with Nearest regardless of distance from the user's search.