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System designMedium
Question
Design a location-biased place autocomplete/geocoding service: as a user types ('star', 'starb…'), return ranked place and address suggestions in under 50ms, biased toward the user's current location, across a global gazetteer of 500M places/addresses. Cover the text index, how location biases ranking, and the latency budget.
What a strong answer looks like
Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.
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