For anyone else wondering, like I did, why you would use a hexagonal indexing system instead of a (roughly square) latitude longitude system, from https://eng.uber.com/elk/:
"Data size matters in Elasticsearch; a large index means too much data, caching churn, and poor response time. When query volumes are large, ELK nodes become overloaded, causing long garbage collection pauses or even system outages.
To address this, we switched to hexagonal queries, dividing our maps into hexagonal cells. Each hexagonal cell has a string ID determined by the hexagon resolution level. A geodistance query can be roughly translated to a ring of hexagon IDs; although a hexagonal ring is not a circular surface, it is close enough for our use case. Due to this adjustment, our system’s query capacity more than tripled."
"Data size matters in Elasticsearch; a large index means too much data, caching churn, and poor response time. When query volumes are large, ELK nodes become overloaded, causing long garbage collection pauses or even system outages.
To address this, we switched to hexagonal queries, dividing our maps into hexagonal cells. Each hexagonal cell has a string ID determined by the hexagon resolution level. A geodistance query can be roughly translated to a ring of hexagon IDs; although a hexagonal ring is not a circular surface, it is close enough for our use case. Due to this adjustment, our system’s query capacity more than tripled."