This is a general problem with solutions in the space. Part of the niceness of say geohashes is that they telescope down. The startup I'm involved with has dev

This is a general problem with solutions in the space. Part of the niceness of say geohashes is that they telescope down. The startup I'm involved with has developed what we call a geohash phrase. The core idea is to map English (or whatever language) words to the characters of a geohash. We usually map a word two-characters at a time, giving us 10-bits of precision for each additional word. So your location might be something like: "The big dog walks near the red house." What is nice is that the phrase telescopes. So you can be vague when you want and only provide say the first three words of your location.