Track 5 · Design Interview Problems
Geo Indexing Field Guide (Geohash, Quadtree, S2, H3 Interactive)
Computers index one dimension. The earth has two. This field guide breaks down how Geohash, Quadtree, Google S2, and Uber H3 project geographic coordinates into 1D space, why naive bounding boxes melt databases, and which spatial partitioning scheme to pick in production.
Guide33 min read
On this page
- The 2 AM midnight crash in Indiranagar
- The simple version
- Going deeper: Geohash and the Z-order curve
- Going deeper: Quadtrees and adaptive spatial decomposition
- Going deeper: Google S2 and the Hilbert curve on a cube sphere
- Going deeper: Uber H3 and the power of hexagons
- War room: what breaks in production
- Which one to choose: the spatial index decision matrix
- Common traps and how to avoid them
- Sources and assumptions