One of our applications has user generated content with a geolocation attached to each of the items. For several selections we want to show the top 10 nearest items. If they are only a few, the radius has to be very large to have some items in the result set.

Currently the Geo module only supports a range up to 20.000 km. So your idea does not work at the moment. I agree that those items are not really "nearby", but to be consistent through out the application it would be nice to be able to select without a max distance.