# Search by Location

Being able to search your maps by a location is one of the most important parts of using a map plugin. So here's how you do it.

When building your element query (in either Twig or PHP) you can pass an object to the map field that will let you search by your location. This object can have the following properties:

• location: An address string, map field, or { lat: 0, lng: 0 } object to search by.
• country: An optional country to restrict the address string to.
• radius: The radius around the location to get results from. Defaults to 50.
• unit: The distance unit to use. Can be either mi (miles) or km (kilometres). Defaults to km.

# By Address

Let's say you want to search for a location within 10 miles of a given address (this can be a full address, or just part of an address like a town or city name). In that case you would do the following:

{% set entries = craft.entries.myMapField({
    location: 'Maidstone, Kent',
    radius: 10,
    unit: 'mi',
}).all() %}

Here we're saying that we want to find all locations with 10 (radius) miles (unit) of Maidstone, Kent (location).

# By Coordinates

Alternatively you could have a set of coordinates that you want to search by. In that case you would pass the coordinates to the location parameter instead of an address string.

{% set entries = craft.entries.myMapField({
    location: { lat: 51.272154, lng: 0.514951 },
}).all() %}

By excluding the other fields we're letting them fall back to their defaults (as specified above). In this case we're searching for all locations around those given coordinates within 50 kilometres.