About POI Explorer
A Hobby Project Born from Curiosity
POI Explorer started as a personal project because I love working with large datasets. There's something deeply satisfying about taking 720 million records and making them browsable, searchable, and fast. No venture funding, no team of engineers — just a developer, a mini PC, and a lot of curiosity about what's possible.
The entire site is powered by open data from OpenStreetMap, GeoNames, and WhosOnFirst, indexed into Elasticsearch. Every point of interest on the planet — from a pizza shop in Houston to a temple in Kyoto — is queryable in milliseconds.
The Hardware
POI Explorer runs on an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS mini PC. That's it. A machine roughly the size of a thick paperback book handles 720 million Elasticsearch documents, serves the Laravel application through nginx and PHP-FPM inside Docker containers, runs a local Gemma 3 (1B parameter) AI model via Ollama for generating venue descriptions, and manages background job queues for cache warming — all simultaneously.
Every aspect of the site is highly optimized to run on this modest hardware. Stale-while-revalidate caching ensures pages load in under 100ms on repeat visits. AI descriptions generate in the background so they never slow down your browsing. Elasticsearch queries are scoped and limited to prevent memory exhaustion. It's proof that you don't need cloud infrastructure to serve millions of data points — you just need to be thoughtful about how you use the resources you have.
Other Projects
If you're into collectibles, check out Pin Portfolio — a tool for Disney pin collectors. It uses AI-powered image recognition to identify entire boards of pins from a single photo, tracks Limited Edition market values, and lets you manage your collection for free. Like POI Explorer, it's built with a focus on making large datasets useful and accessible.
Open Data, Open Exploration
POI Explorer is free to use. The data comes from community-driven open data projects, and this site is my way of giving that data a home where anyone can explore it. If you find it useful, that's all the reward I need. If you want to support the project, the affiliate links on venue pages help cover the electricity bill for that little mini PC.