See also the GeoHash, which lets you remove characters from the end at a gradual loss of precision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.or

See also the GeoHash, which lets you remove characters from the end at a gradual loss of precision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash In my mind the big issue with these is that while they're easy to transmit, you don't actually want to store them because then you lose the ability to do proximity or point in polygon searches.