I can't figure out how to generate a hash. There's no right-click functionality and I'm not about to input coordinates when I should be able to just click the map. What am I not understanding here?
the less digits you give, the less precise your input looks, the bigger the geohash tile you're in and the bigger the difference between your input and the tile's center.
It was also implemented in relational databases 30+ years ago and variants were patented by companies like Oracle and IBM. Geohashing was abandoned due to its several deficiencies as an indexing method, which still hold true today, in favor of other algorithms.
Ironically, geohashing seemed novel at the time because it was so obsolete that no modern system uses it. It is sort of like someone claiming to invent punch cards for programming.
indeed, history repeating. There's a nice talk by Jonathan Blow how technology declines and has to be re-invented over and over again: https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk
I'd go so far as to say that any code based on discrete numbers has rounding induced discontinuities, naturally. And with variable precision those can be arbitrarily large.
Take decimal integer representations like 999 and 1000 – they 'look' very different unless you decode them (what we all are use to on the fly). The distance is just 1 but they're in two different buckets in terms of 1e3.