Thank you very much for your answer, especially since you compared the two. That helps me understand even better. Just wanted to let you know Basho is address

Thank you very much for your answer, especially since you compared the two. That helps me understand even better. Just wanted to let you know Basho is addressing some of your wishes. Riak 1.0, which is coming out at the end of this month, has integrated riak search (so it is no longer a separate install) and also has integrated secondary indexes (on numerical values, so not full text search but integrated nicely.) I believe, it may be possible, to do geo-spatial searches using the new index system, but I've only thought about it, haven't tried it yet. (It's not built in, but I think its something one could build, and I'd like to build myself eventually.) They now have binary builds for installing on Mac OS X (IIRC) and I've been able to install via homebrew and source lately, so they might have fixed that. They've also got a new thing called riak_pipe which is really useful for certain classes of problems (its new so not well documented yet.) Anyway, thanks again for your answer, and just wanted to let you know Basho seems to be addressing the issues you ran into.