Many applications need more than boolean inside/outside tests: they need how far apart two geometries are, whether entities fall within a buffer around a route, or a compact geohash key for bucketing nearby points.
Distance
The shortest path between two points on the Earth is often approximated in databases using great-circle or similar metrics, depending on your CRS and functions available. SurrealDB’s geo::distance() calculates the distance between two geolocation points, and can be useful when ranking “nearest” results or filtering by a maximum radius.
When you only need ordering, you may still use distance in an ORDER BY clause. When you need a hard cutoff, combine it with a WHERE threshold.
Geohashes
Geohashes approximate location with a short string that prefixes share when points are nearby, and are useful for rough bucketing and cache keys. SurrealDB provides geo::hash::encode() and geo::hash::decode() for moving between points and geohash strings.
Next steps
For end-to-end examples that tie these ideas to product features, see Location-based patterns.