I believe it's even more limited to just storing points. One could do a query within a bounding box that does not cross the international date line, and maybe a

I believe it's even more limited to just storing points. One could do a query within a bounding box that does not cross the international date line, and maybe a radius search and that's about it. Geohashes are good in that it doesn't need any fancy indexing as nearby points are also nearby in the index.