16 ms·

Street View turns 15

ge96 4y ago
This tech is amazing as far as the mapping effort in a random poor country like islands. I wonder if somewhere out there like a supercomputer they have a 1:1 mesh/depth map of the world ha as they've mapped it. On a side note I also applaud/miss their 360 photosphere app that tied in with the g cardboard.
petee 4y ago
So does this mean they are going back and updating old imagery? My neighborhood (in a small city) hasn't been updated since 2011, and quite a few areas have street views that don't match reality anymore
- lionkor 4y ago
  Looks extremely simple for anyone to do this for google now, so I'd guess yes
- JamesAdir 4y ago
  I think that's what they are doing with the live view street directions. They can easily recreate the new imagery based on the users photos.
  - Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
    I very much doubt it. The entire point of that is to gauge the location of the user based on the existing street view imagery. Perhaps they'll add something eventually where users can contribute imagery from their phones, but I think that feature won't be the way to do it.
    - bseidensticker 4y ago
      They already have user contributed imagery. In parks, Google usually maps the paths but you can see dots off the paths for user added points.
- ollifi 4y ago
  Looks like streetview of center of Helsinki was last updated 2009. Granted it's not very big either but capital of a european country still.
- masklinn 4y ago
  That has been happening all along, but I would expect not everywhere.
jjbinx007 4y ago
Will they now allow mobile users to see older street view images? At the moment it's only possible to see this on desktop.
- ntauthority 4y ago
  From the article: > Starting today on Android and iOS globally, it’s now easier than ever to travel back in time right from your phone. So yes, this is possible now.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    Now if only they could add that to the Desktop version of Google Earth, too… (Weirdly enough, historic aerial imagery is only available in the desktop client. You can also look at current street view images there, but for historic pictures you then always need to pull up the same location in the browser…)
wodenokoto 4y ago
I think street view was one of the most audacious features I remember ever seeing in a product. I wish I knew the strategic and business analysis that was behind thinking up the feature, green lighting and funding it. I definitely did not have the foresight to see how street view could ever be worth the investment 15 years ago. Today I am more inclined to see the tremendous value of google maps as a whole.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdponx 4y ago
  It's astounding that surveillance advertising is so profitable that it can fund enterprises like this.
  - astrange 4y ago
    “Surveillance” isn’t very profitable; Google ad targeting isn’t even good and when it is good it doesn’t need your data. (For instance, if you search for “buy ps5” they don’t need a secret profile to show you ads for a PS5.) The reason their ads make infinite money is they’re the best at serving them, they’re vertically integrated, and their ad auction systems are set up to cheat in their favor.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      If that were true then they wouldn't collect it. It doesn't mean it's effective, but it's still clearly profitable.
      - astrange 4y ago
        I said “very profitable”. “Surveillance capitalism” earns nothing compared to how much cash Apple makes, but there isn’t a field of studying “cell phone capitalism”.
        4y ago
rob74 4y ago
...meanwhile, StreetView imagery for Germany has turned 14 - i.e. in much of Germany (major cities only), StreetView still shows the images from the original drive-through from 2008. After that (and a series of legal challenges which led to a ruling saying that buildings have to be blurred if one inhabitant objects to it being visible on StreetView), Google has apparently lost interest. The "3D buildings" feature, which is not affected by this ruling for some reason, gives a much better overview anyway...
- tpm 4y ago
  In Slovakia, the StreetView is quite up to date but curiously the satellite/airplane photos are about 10 years old and as a result, some neighbourhoods are hard to recognize.
  - thenthenthen 4y ago
    Last summer in berlin I saw several ‘streetview’ like rigged cars, amongst them a Apple branded car with dslrs(!) mounted all around on a space frame... prolly autonomous driving tests though?
    - Markoff 4y ago
      it could be just cars checking paid parking, quite common in Prague, it looks like this here https://cdn.forbesmedia.cz/images/eyJ1IjoiXC91cGxvYWRzXC8yMDE5XC8wOFwvZWx0b2RvLmpwZyIsInciOjE5MjAsInYiOiIxLjAifQ==.webp https://cdn.forbesmedia.cz/images/eyJ1IjoiXC91cGxvYWRzXC8yMD...
- Aulig 4y ago
  I don't think they've given up - I saw a streetview car driving through my village a couple weeks ago.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Zoom out to an overview of Europe. Drag the street view-guy. Be amazed. My city's street view is gone, for one.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I remember where I was when I first used streetview (and I have a generally bad memory for things that long ago). Was such an amazing feeling and a real living in the future kind if thing. More so than using an iPhone for the first time
heleninboodler 4y ago
I remember in 2009 being part of an online community where I preferred to be anonymous and while reading a thread where people were sharing photos of sunsets, had the thought that eventually, there would be enough information out there that my precise location could automatically be determined based on me taking a picture looking out at the city from my balcony. That's a pretty creepy thought, and it seems that google is approaching it, given that they can have you point your camera "across the street" to determine your location from their glorgabytes of street view imagery.
- masklinn 4y ago
  Geoguessing has been going on for a while, and some people are very good at it. One of the situations where it’s deployed for the good of all is real estate: it’s very common for brokers to hide the exact location for various reasons, but there are forums and individuals who from just a few pictures pointing outdoors and a rough location (e..g closest city) can very quickly find the exact location the picture was taken from. Super useful so you don’t have to waste time visiting in order to find out that the house which looked good over the internet is sandwiched between a 6-lane highway and a pig farm, or is in a gated community, or can only be accessed through an easement.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    Yes, I intentionally used the word "automatically" to my description, since it's very obvious to me that it's already often doable if a human is willing to engage their brain and do research. Whenever I use airbnb, I make a game out of finding the actual addresses of the places I'm considering based on clues I can see in the photos and approximate maps on the site.
    - mgdlbp 4y ago
      I also find locating images an interesting skill to develop. I originally only wanted to mention https://old.reddit.com/r/picturegame https://old.reddit.com/r/picturegame,* which I find more "organic" than Geoguessr: players submit single images, which are identified using whatever means are available. It has a quirk in that often people submit images found online, which must be obfuscated to prevent trivial reverse image searching. A randomly transformed translucent mask is recommended, but those are still relatively easily reversed! I haven't tried, though--maybe there's greater difficult than at first apparent. * It turns out, after an HN search, that this is a more common organized activity than I'd thought; this thread lists several other communities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692172
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mahathu 4y ago
if the Asian couple was always happy in their house why did they move out?
leokennis 4y ago
If there's one product that showcases Google's strengths and Apple's weaknesses it's Street View. Google has mapped/streetviewed the world twice over, producing useful photo's that help in navigation. And now is building a new camera so they can map the Amazon as well. Meanwhile Apple is juuuuust about ready polishing and color grading their 20th run of 4K "Look Around" footage of 5th Avenue in New York, fingers crossed this time it will be production ready! You can expect footage of your medium-to-large city any decade now!
- givinguflac 4y ago
  I live in a small town and look around on Apple Maps is everywhere. What’s wrong with it in NY?
- astrange 4y ago
  Bold of you to claim that Gmaps is actually updated just because they say it is. Brisbane (the Australia one) has a 3D satellite map from 2010 despite the 2022 copyright date on it. And if you walk along the street view images, it tends to tell you you’re currently viewing the underground tunnel you’re over rather than the surface street you’re actually looking at, which is a funny bug.
  - rubychill 4y ago
    There must be something going on with the tunnels in Brisbane in google maps. I recently looked up directions to a restaurant in the valley and they were leading me to the clem 7 directly beneath it.
  - BrandoElFollito 4y ago
    Just for the record, there are two dates: the copyright one (useless BTW) and data recording one.
- marcellus23 4y ago
  You don't think the fact that Google Maps had a 10 year lead makes a difference?
- 4y ago
LeonM 4y ago
For those interested in the history of such software, I can recommend "The Billion Dollar code" on Netflix. It's the story about the team behind TerraVision, a predecessor of Google Maps. Though the story is not depicted completely accurate, it gives a great hacker vibe from the early days of computing. Can recommend.
derriz 4y ago
I'd love if they improved navigation while in Street View. It works okay when the geometry is simple - like on a long road/street with no junctions. But in more geometrically complex areas - for example, in urban settings around squares or on wide boulevards which have multiple paths - it's frustrating. Often I find the only way to move to where I want is by going back to the map view and clicking somewhere on a nearby blue line. Same in areas there are no roads/paths but have lots of user submitted panoramic photos - common in historical areas - for example around Roman/Greek/Egyption ruins - you have to go back to the map.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  I'd love for them to integrate NeRF with street view to allow free fly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lGMCAzBzOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lGMCAzBzOQ
NGRhodes 4y ago
Like Google search and maps, Street View quality seems focused on large towns, cities and areas of high population. I only live a few miles into a large rural area from one of UKs largest conurbations and our village is 13 years out of date for street view, and 9/10 years old for Satellite imagery. Google maps is missing most of the nearby small single track unpaved roads and about 75% of footpaths (all marked on definitive maps are public rights of way), its so bad there is a 2 mile long, 1 mile wide woods on the edge of our village that is completely missing (including the road and footpaths through it), there is just a big blank, yet Street View clearly shows the entrances and the woods behind.
- danjc 4y ago
  Last year I was living in a small village in the UK. Interestingly, street view for my street there was updated about 8 months ago so perhaps it will get to you!
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Doesn't it make sense to you that such data collections would be population-weighted?
  - NGRhodes 4y ago
    It make sense for Google to steer their products, not for generalised mapping.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Our small town gets a "pass" every once in awhile (amusingly enough you can be on one side of the street and see the older view as it's clearly summer, the other side of the street is newer and you can see the new gas station in winter). I suspect that for smaller towns they have some sort of trigger based on things like new gas stations opening, etc, that causes a car to go by eventually.
seydor 4y ago
Love streetview through a VR headset. So many empty museums to see, so many places to visit around the world, except Germany
wfhordie 4y ago
Is Street View still illegal in Germany? Are there places in the world that haven’t been co-opted by surveillance capitalists?
- april_22 4y ago
  Most major cities (where most of the population lives) have been mapped out.
  - usr1106 4y ago
    I don't think that's a fully correct characterization. Those scenes that exist are still from 2008. They seem to have given up after the initial storm. And I'd not deem it completely out that another protest wave would start should they try again.
  - phatfish 4y ago
    It's old data. But the 3D view from the plane cams is a good enough replacement at this point (where it is available), if you want a better view of an area than a satellite gives. Apart from just being nosey, i find street view helpful when driving to an address you don't know, for picking out landmarks etc. The 3D view just about makes up for the lack of street view in that regard.
    - wfhordie 4y ago
      I find street view useful, but I also think it's a massive invasion of privacy and if it were banned I would not be upset.
- usr1106 4y ago
  It has never been illegal. Public opinion against it was stronger than Google and they have obviously not dared to try again.
otras 4y ago
One of the neatest yet subtlest features in my experience is going back through time to see the streetview for a given position over time. It’s especially interesting in Boston’s Seaport or other areas that have seen a lot of development in the last ten years, where you can see the changes over time. I’m not sure where the option is on mobile (or if it’s even available), but it’s a great feature on desktop.
- julianlam 4y ago
  The blog post details that viewing historical images is now available on mobile
  - otras 4y ago
    Ah sorry I meant mobile web, where I had checked since I usually use desktop web. Thanks for calling that out!
- april_22 4y ago
  It's been such an incredible discovery seeing what my neighborhood looked like in 2008. You can quite literally go back in time with this technology and it's nothing but astonishing.
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  Historical Street View is the main reason I hope Google is still around in a hundred years. It is the single most comprehensive record of the built environment ever assembled, and its simple, broad accessibility belies the depth of its value as a historical tool. In Chicago, there's no more profound Street View experience than virtually walking the streets of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project in its twilight of 2007, just as the last tenants had been moved out and the towers were beginning to come down. Even through the grainy, first-generation Street View camera, the haunting specter of neglect and despair comes through clear as day. Jump forward a few years, and the towers disappear, leaving greenfields. A few more jumps, and construction fences appear, quickly followed by condos. Less than a decade later, the area is completely unrecognizable. And now – can you imagine what it would be like to look back fifty years in Street View? A hundred?
rootsudo 4y ago
I wonder how much Streetview has changed the shape of buying real estate remote. Used to be a time you couldn't just see the history of a neighborhood and condition of an area over time.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It definitely helps get a "feel" for the neighborhood but it can often be out of date. I've noticed some real estate listings now include drone shots, perhaps to compensate.
- april_22 4y ago
  Dang, I've actually never thought about this but it is such a powerful tool for checking how the neighborhood looked like before.
mrbonner 4y ago
It is interesting that there is a large number of consultants (I.e: low wage workers) working behind the scenes to support G Map [0]. Cognizant is their employer which is another surprise for me as I always thought it is an Indian company mainly employs people in India for outsourcing projects. The gas price is so ridiculously high in WA now that they are asking to postpone the RTO full time plan in June. I have switched to Apple Map since 2018 and still don’t miss GMap. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/google-maps-workers-office.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/google-maps-wo...
- advisedwang 4y ago
  I'm curious if you've seen anything about Apple's equivalent. My impressions is basically every mass data set has an army of low paid workers somewhere, but maybe not and specifics are always interesting.
- rconti 4y ago
  | high cost of housing in Bothell I've been away from the PNW for a long time, apparently. Reading further, one person spoke of a 70 mile commute from Olympia; another of 50 miles from Puyallup, and how they'd have to quit because they can't afford the commute. For those not from the area, they're commuting from one less-densely populated area, ACROSS a densely populated area, to another less-densely-populated area. Of course, we all have reasons to live where we live (family connections, other employed members of the household close to work, etc). But in this particular example, the commute has basically nothing to do with housing costs. If it was about costs, they could live more cheaply much closer to Bothell. It's all about commute choices.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Street view is almost required when booking Airbnbs now. It's incredible how often the Airbnb photos look great and then you pull up street view and realize why the place was 20% cheaper than similar stays...
- llampx 4y ago
  Airbnb's don't have exact addresses and usually no exterior photos. How do you find them on street view? I'd be interested because it would help me as well.
  - AlwaysRock 4y ago
    Well they typically give a rough location. I'm mostly looking to see if the neighborhood seems okay or not.
Imnimo 4y ago
Sometimes I just load up google maps, drop the streetview pin in an arbitrary spot, and click around looking for something weird or interesting. I always wish they'd add more countries, especially in Asia and Africa but I'm sure the business case for "guy likes to idly click around and wants more countries" isn't very strong.
- foobarian 4y ago
  I would kill for a driving simulator with streets and texture data from Street View!
  - PoignardAzur 4y ago
    Microsoft Flight Simulator 2025: The One With The Ground Planes.
colourgarden 4y ago
Surprised to see no mention of Geoguessr yet - awesome game and community built on top of Street View - https://www.geoguessr.com https://www.geoguessr.com
- xnorswap 4y ago
  I love Geoguessr but it has a distinct randomisation problem (certainly in the competitive pool) that it hasn't solved. If you play regularly you'll begin to notice that around 1 in 10 cities are in fact Vienna. I'm not sure how it chooses, I suspect it first picks a country, then picks a city. Without weighting for population or other factors, you end up with a significant number of Taiwan, Singapore and Vienna, far more than their populations or areas should suggest.
  - invalidusernam3 4y ago
    Which game mode are you playing where you have that issue? I've played countless hours of Geoguessr and haven't noticed that
    - xnorswap 4y ago
      The competitive mode in which you try to guess before your opponent, it's the standard mode now. (They've rebadged the old mode "geoguessr classic".)
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  Man, since when did you have to make an account to use this site? I've played it before and this definitely is a new addition. I just simply refuse to make accounts for every little game I spend 5 min playing on the internet.
  - OctopusLupid 4y ago
    It's been there for quite some time. I believe the street view API is really not cheap for them to use, and the accounts are there to enforce the time limitation.
bamboozled 4y ago
Does anyone actually use street view for anything but novel purposes? I've used it maybe 5 times when I couldn't find the place I was looking for using the standard map view; However in nearly all cases, resorting to StreetView meant the place I was looking for was gone anyway.
- dwater 4y ago
  Yes, almost daily. When I'm going somewhere new, what does the front of the building look like? Where is there parking? How do I access the parking? What are the parking fees and restrictions? How visible is a landmark from the street? Which street is the entrance on? And that's just when I'm planning a trip, one of many use cases.
- LancerSykera 4y ago
  It was helpful in my truck driving days when going to customers I'd never been to before, and it was absolutely a daily tool in telecom construction/maintenance. Example - random sheriff's office calls in a phone line ripped down when I've got one foot out the door for the day. I pulled up the address on Streetview while she was explaining the scene to me, and it sure looked like coax on that side of the street, our lines were on the other side. Sure enough, 45 minute drive later I called the sheriff and told them to call the cable company. When you cover an area hundreds of square miles you can't go look at every job before sending a crew out. Pull it up on Streetview, even if the images are 10 years old it's probably still the same.
- upbeat_general 4y ago
  Yes, all the time. Before going to a place to see parking, how it looks, etc
- maccard 4y ago
  Not too long ago I had a leak that I suspected the previous owner had repaired. I was able to confirm with street view pictures that it's been repaired and patched over at least three separate times since 2008!
- jeffbee 4y ago
everybodyknows 4y ago
Curious that no one else has mentioned what I find most addictive -- the unfiltered view of anthropology at street level spanning most of the world. Local fashion and architectural styles, history preserved or not, public safety infrastructure, private wealth versus public wealth, rule of law or local strong men, trust in law enforcement ... Clues everywhere, if you take the time to look.
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  I had a project collecting photos from street view. https://instagram.com/noplacetosit https://instagram.com/noplacetosit I stopped using insta because the format was wrong for this project. One day I'll make a dedicated website for it... one day.
renewiltord 4y ago
Incredible stuff. The various Google properties have performed an incredible objective of recording our history. One could imagine the ad supported empire as this personal consumption tax that funds human information recording. Glorious.
wnevets 4y ago
Thinking about driving without google maps sounds so stressful.
- Vladimof 4y ago
  I strictly use OsmAnd~ on Android and it is a pain to use, specially in states where openstreetmap.org don't map street addresses like in Georgia. I often have to convert addresses to latitude/longitude first...
rob_c 4y ago
Great, now can we get it to scale with processing power. It was somehow more usable 10yr ago on most hardware...
upbeat_general 4y ago
I’m continually jealous of the street view dataset and disappointed there’s no public/free alternative. They provide API access but it’s very hamstrung and extremely expensive, making it essentially useless for anything except pulling up a single image of a location. It’s useless for any real mapping/localization/analysis project.
- mvexel 4y ago
  There’s Mapillary (acquired by meta but imagery is free to use in most cases) and KartaView (Grab). Both are crowdsourced platforms. https://www.mapillary.com/ https://www.mapillary.com/ https://kartaview.org/landing https://kartaview.org/landing
  - upbeat_general 4y ago
    I didn't know about these! Still, since they're crowd-sourced from phone data, they only have a single view (no 360 in most places), inaccurate (or at least not reliably accurate) camera calibration, no accurate localization, and possibly most importantly, no LiDAR data. That's a lot of things that make it much harder to deal with and limit the potential compared to street view.
erichurkman 4y ago
And still no way to un-block street view from my address. It's the only house on the block that is blurred, which makes it _less_ private. (The previous owner had it blocked.)
- MafellUser 4y ago
  Can you explain why it's less private?
omega3 4y ago
Google had a very productive 5 year period where every year they were releasing massive groundbreaking products that were 10x better than competitors: Gmail, Maps, Street View, G Suite, Google Earth, Translate. Since then I'd struggle to count even 5 products that stand out: Android, Chrome and what else?
xnx 4y ago
Does anyone remember when Amazon (briefly) had a Street View competitor? Having a hard time finding any trace of it on the web.

ge96 4y ago

This tech is amazing as far as the mapping effort in a random poor country like islands. I wonder if somewhere out there like a supercomputer they have a 1:1 mesh/depth map of the world ha as they've mapped it. On a side note I also applaud/miss their 360 photosphere app that tied in with the g cardboard.

petee 4y ago

So does this mean they are going back and updating old imagery? My neighborhood (in a small city) hasn't been updated since 2011, and quite a few areas have street views that don't match reality anymore

lionkor 4y ago
Looks extremely simple for anyone to do this for google now, so I'd guess yes
JamesAdir 4y ago
I think that's what they are doing with the live view street directions. They can easily recreate the new imagery based on the users photos.
- Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
  I very much doubt it. The entire point of that is to gauge the location of the user based on the existing street view imagery. Perhaps they'll add something eventually where users can contribute imagery from their phones, but I think that feature won't be the way to do it.
  - bseidensticker 4y ago
    They already have user contributed imagery. In parks, Google usually maps the paths but you can see dots off the paths for user added points.
ollifi 4y ago
Looks like streetview of center of Helsinki was last updated 2009. Granted it's not very big either but capital of a european country still.
masklinn 4y ago
That has been happening all along, but I would expect not everywhere.

jjbinx007 4y ago

Will they now allow mobile users to see older street view images? At the moment it's only possible to see this on desktop.

ntauthority 4y ago
From the article: > Starting today on Android and iOS globally, it’s now easier than ever to travel back in time right from your phone. So yes, this is possible now.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  Now if only they could add that to the Desktop version of Google Earth, too… (Weirdly enough, historic aerial imagery is only available in the desktop client. You can also look at current street view images there, but for historic pictures you then always need to pull up the same location in the browser…)

wodenokoto 4y ago

I think street view was one of the most audacious features I remember ever seeing in a product. I wish I knew the strategic and business analysis that was behind thinking up the feature, green lighting and funding it. I definitely did not have the foresight to see how street view could ever be worth the investment 15 years ago. Today I am more inclined to see the tremendous value of google maps as a whole.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nerdponx 4y ago
It's astounding that surveillance advertising is so profitable that it can fund enterprises like this.
- astrange 4y ago
  “Surveillance” isn’t very profitable; Google ad targeting isn’t even good and when it is good it doesn’t need your data. (For instance, if you search for “buy ps5” they don’t need a secret profile to show you ads for a PS5.) The reason their ads make infinite money is they’re the best at serving them, they’re vertically integrated, and their ad auction systems are set up to cheat in their favor.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    If that were true then they wouldn't collect it. It doesn't mean it's effective, but it's still clearly profitable.
    - astrange 4y ago
      I said “very profitable”. “Surveillance capitalism” earns nothing compared to how much cash Apple makes, but there isn’t a field of studying “cell phone capitalism”.
      - 4y ago

rob74 4y ago

...meanwhile, StreetView imagery for Germany has turned 14 - i.e. in much of Germany (major cities only), StreetView still shows the images from the original drive-through from 2008. After that (and a series of legal challenges which led to a ruling saying that buildings have to be blurred if one inhabitant objects to it being visible on StreetView), Google has apparently lost interest. The "3D buildings" feature, which is not affected by this ruling for some reason, gives a much better overview anyway...

tpm 4y ago
In Slovakia, the StreetView is quite up to date but curiously the satellite/airplane photos are about 10 years old and as a result, some neighbourhoods are hard to recognize.
- thenthenthen 4y ago
  Last summer in berlin I saw several ‘streetview’ like rigged cars, amongst them a Apple branded car with dslrs(!) mounted all around on a space frame... prolly autonomous driving tests though?
  - Markoff 4y ago
    it could be just cars checking paid parking, quite common in Prague, it looks like this here https://cdn.forbesmedia.cz/images/eyJ1IjoiXC91cGxvYWRzXC8yMDE5XC8wOFwvZWx0b2RvLmpwZyIsInciOjE5MjAsInYiOiIxLjAifQ==.webp https://cdn.forbesmedia.cz/images/eyJ1IjoiXC91cGxvYWRzXC8yMD...
Aulig 4y ago
I don't think they've given up - I saw a streetview car driving through my village a couple weeks ago.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Zoom out to an overview of Europe. Drag the street view-guy. Be amazed. My city's street view is gone, for one.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I remember where I was when I first used streetview (and I have a generally bad memory for things that long ago). Was such an amazing feeling and a real living in the future kind if thing. More so than using an iPhone for the first time

heleninboodler 4y ago

I remember in 2009 being part of an online community where I preferred to be anonymous and while reading a thread where people were sharing photos of sunsets, had the thought that eventually, there would be enough information out there that my precise location could automatically be determined based on me taking a picture looking out at the city from my balcony. That's a pretty creepy thought, and it seems that google is approaching it, given that they can have you point your camera "across the street" to determine your location from their glorgabytes of street view imagery.

masklinn 4y ago
Geoguessing has been going on for a while, and some people are very good at it. One of the situations where it’s deployed for the good of all is real estate: it’s very common for brokers to hide the exact location for various reasons, but there are forums and individuals who from just a few pictures pointing outdoors and a rough location (e..g closest city) can very quickly find the exact location the picture was taken from. Super useful so you don’t have to waste time visiting in order to find out that the house which looked good over the internet is sandwiched between a 6-lane highway and a pig farm, or is in a gated community, or can only be accessed through an easement.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  Yes, I intentionally used the word "automatically" to my description, since it's very obvious to me that it's already often doable if a human is willing to engage their brain and do research. Whenever I use airbnb, I make a game out of finding the actual addresses of the places I'm considering based on clues I can see in the photos and approximate maps on the site.
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    I also find locating images an interesting skill to develop. I originally only wanted to mention https://old.reddit.com/r/picturegame https://old.reddit.com/r/picturegame,* which I find more "organic" than Geoguessr: players submit single images, which are identified using whatever means are available. It has a quirk in that often people submit images found online, which must be obfuscated to prevent trivial reverse image searching. A randomly transformed translucent mask is recommended, but those are still relatively easily reversed! I haven't tried, though--maybe there's greater difficult than at first apparent. * It turns out, after an HN search, that this is a more common organized activity than I'd thought; this thread lists several other communities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692172

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mahathu 4y ago

if the Asian couple was always happy in their house why did they move out?

leokennis 4y ago

If there's one product that showcases Google's strengths and Apple's weaknesses it's Street View. Google has mapped/streetviewed the world twice over, producing useful photo's that help in navigation. And now is building a new camera so they can map the Amazon as well. Meanwhile Apple is juuuuust about ready polishing and color grading their 20th run of 4K "Look Around" footage of 5th Avenue in New York, fingers crossed this time it will be production ready! You can expect footage of your medium-to-large city any decade now!

givinguflac 4y ago
I live in a small town and look around on Apple Maps is everywhere. What’s wrong with it in NY?
astrange 4y ago
Bold of you to claim that Gmaps is actually updated just because they say it is. Brisbane (the Australia one) has a 3D satellite map from 2010 despite the 2022 copyright date on it. And if you walk along the street view images, it tends to tell you you’re currently viewing the underground tunnel you’re over rather than the surface street you’re actually looking at, which is a funny bug.
- rubychill 4y ago
  There must be something going on with the tunnels in Brisbane in google maps. I recently looked up directions to a restaurant in the valley and they were leading me to the clem 7 directly beneath it.
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  Just for the record, there are two dates: the copyright one (useless BTW) and data recording one.
marcellus23 4y ago
You don't think the fact that Google Maps had a 10 year lead makes a difference?
4y ago

LeonM 4y ago

For those interested in the history of such software, I can recommend "The Billion Dollar code" on Netflix. It's the story about the team behind TerraVision, a predecessor of Google Maps. Though the story is not depicted completely accurate, it gives a great hacker vibe from the early days of computing. Can recommend.

derriz 4y ago

I'd love if they improved navigation while in Street View. It works okay when the geometry is simple - like on a long road/street with no junctions. But in more geometrically complex areas - for example, in urban settings around squares or on wide boulevards which have multiple paths - it's frustrating. Often I find the only way to move to where I want is by going back to the map view and clicking somewhere on a nearby blue line. Same in areas there are no roads/paths but have lots of user submitted panoramic photos - common in historical areas - for example around Roman/Greek/Egyption ruins - you have to go back to the map.

ehsankia 4y ago
I'd love for them to integrate NeRF with street view to allow free fly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lGMCAzBzOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lGMCAzBzOQ

NGRhodes 4y ago

Like Google search and maps, Street View quality seems focused on large towns, cities and areas of high population. I only live a few miles into a large rural area from one of UKs largest conurbations and our village is 13 years out of date for street view, and 9/10 years old for Satellite imagery. Google maps is missing most of the nearby small single track unpaved roads and about 75% of footpaths (all marked on definitive maps are public rights of way), its so bad there is a 2 mile long, 1 mile wide woods on the edge of our village that is completely missing (including the road and footpaths through it), there is just a big blank, yet Street View clearly shows the entrances and the woods behind.

danjc 4y ago
Last year I was living in a small village in the UK. Interestingly, street view for my street there was updated about 8 months ago so perhaps it will get to you!
jeffbee 4y ago
Doesn't it make sense to you that such data collections would be population-weighted?
- NGRhodes 4y ago
  It make sense for Google to steer their products, not for generalised mapping.
bombcar 4y ago
Our small town gets a "pass" every once in awhile (amusingly enough you can be on one side of the street and see the older view as it's clearly summer, the other side of the street is newer and you can see the new gas station in winter). I suspect that for smaller towns they have some sort of trigger based on things like new gas stations opening, etc, that causes a car to go by eventually.

seydor 4y ago

Love streetview through a VR headset. So many empty museums to see, so many places to visit around the world, except Germany

wfhordie 4y ago

Is Street View still illegal in Germany? Are there places in the world that haven’t been co-opted by surveillance capitalists?

april_22 4y ago
Most major cities (where most of the population lives) have been mapped out.
- usr1106 4y ago
  I don't think that's a fully correct characterization. Those scenes that exist are still from 2008. They seem to have given up after the initial storm. And I'd not deem it completely out that another protest wave would start should they try again.
- phatfish 4y ago
  It's old data. But the 3D view from the plane cams is a good enough replacement at this point (where it is available), if you want a better view of an area than a satellite gives. Apart from just being nosey, i find street view helpful when driving to an address you don't know, for picking out landmarks etc. The 3D view just about makes up for the lack of street view in that regard.
  - wfhordie 4y ago
    I find street view useful, but I also think it's a massive invasion of privacy and if it were banned I would not be upset.
usr1106 4y ago
It has never been illegal. Public opinion against it was stronger than Google and they have obviously not dared to try again.

otras 4y ago

One of the neatest yet subtlest features in my experience is going back through time to see the streetview for a given position over time. It’s especially interesting in Boston’s Seaport or other areas that have seen a lot of development in the last ten years, where you can see the changes over time. I’m not sure where the option is on mobile (or if it’s even available), but it’s a great feature on desktop.

julianlam 4y ago
The blog post details that viewing historical images is now available on mobile
- otras 4y ago
  Ah sorry I meant mobile web, where I had checked since I usually use desktop web. Thanks for calling that out!
april_22 4y ago
It's been such an incredible discovery seeing what my neighborhood looked like in 2008. You can quite literally go back in time with this technology and it's nothing but astonishing.
mortenjorck 4y ago
Historical Street View is the main reason I hope Google is still around in a hundred years. It is the single most comprehensive record of the built environment ever assembled, and its simple, broad accessibility belies the depth of its value as a historical tool. In Chicago, there's no more profound Street View experience than virtually walking the streets of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project in its twilight of 2007, just as the last tenants had been moved out and the towers were beginning to come down. Even through the grainy, first-generation Street View camera, the haunting specter of neglect and despair comes through clear as day. Jump forward a few years, and the towers disappear, leaving greenfields. A few more jumps, and construction fences appear, quickly followed by condos. Less than a decade later, the area is completely unrecognizable. And now – can you imagine what it would be like to look back fifty years in Street View? A hundred?

rootsudo 4y ago

I wonder how much Streetview has changed the shape of buying real estate remote. Used to be a time you couldn't just see the history of a neighborhood and condition of an area over time.

bombcar 4y ago
It definitely helps get a "feel" for the neighborhood but it can often be out of date. I've noticed some real estate listings now include drone shots, perhaps to compensate.
april_22 4y ago
Dang, I've actually never thought about this but it is such a powerful tool for checking how the neighborhood looked like before.

mrbonner 4y ago

It is interesting that there is a large number of consultants (I.e: low wage workers) working behind the scenes to support G Map [0]. Cognizant is their employer which is another surprise for me as I always thought it is an Indian company mainly employs people in India for outsourcing projects. The gas price is so ridiculously high in WA now that they are asking to postpone the RTO full time plan in June. I have switched to Apple Map since 2018 and still don’t miss GMap. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/google-maps-workers-office.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/technology/google-maps-wo...

advisedwang 4y ago
I'm curious if you've seen anything about Apple's equivalent. My impressions is basically every mass data set has an army of low paid workers somewhere, but maybe not and specifics are always interesting.
rconti 4y ago
| high cost of housing in Bothell I've been away from the PNW for a long time, apparently. Reading further, one person spoke of a 70 mile commute from Olympia; another of 50 miles from Puyallup, and how they'd have to quit because they can't afford the commute. For those not from the area, they're commuting from one less-densely populated area, ACROSS a densely populated area, to another less-densely-populated area. Of course, we all have reasons to live where we live (family connections, other employed members of the household close to work, etc). But in this particular example, the commute has basically nothing to do with housing costs. If it was about costs, they could live more cheaply much closer to Bothell. It's all about commute choices.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Street view is almost required when booking Airbnbs now. It's incredible how often the Airbnb photos look great and then you pull up street view and realize why the place was 20% cheaper than similar stays...

llampx 4y ago
Airbnb's don't have exact addresses and usually no exterior photos. How do you find them on street view? I'd be interested because it would help me as well.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Well they typically give a rough location. I'm mostly looking to see if the neighborhood seems okay or not.

Imnimo 4y ago

Sometimes I just load up google maps, drop the streetview pin in an arbitrary spot, and click around looking for something weird or interesting. I always wish they'd add more countries, especially in Asia and Africa but I'm sure the business case for "guy likes to idly click around and wants more countries" isn't very strong.

foobarian 4y ago
I would kill for a driving simulator with streets and texture data from Street View!
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  Microsoft Flight Simulator 2025: The One With The Ground Planes.

colourgarden 4y ago

Surprised to see no mention of Geoguessr yet - awesome game and community built on top of Street View - https://www.geoguessr.com https://www.geoguessr.com

xnorswap 4y ago
I love Geoguessr but it has a distinct randomisation problem (certainly in the competitive pool) that it hasn't solved. If you play regularly you'll begin to notice that around 1 in 10 cities are in fact Vienna. I'm not sure how it chooses, I suspect it first picks a country, then picks a city. Without weighting for population or other factors, you end up with a significant number of Taiwan, Singapore and Vienna, far more than their populations or areas should suggest.
- invalidusernam3 4y ago
  Which game mode are you playing where you have that issue? I've played countless hours of Geoguessr and haven't noticed that
  - xnorswap 4y ago
    The competitive mode in which you try to guess before your opponent, it's the standard mode now. (They've rebadged the old mode "geoguessr classic".)
uejfiweun 4y ago
Man, since when did you have to make an account to use this site? I've played it before and this definitely is a new addition. I just simply refuse to make accounts for every little game I spend 5 min playing on the internet.
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  It's been there for quite some time. I believe the street view API is really not cheap for them to use, and the accounts are there to enforce the time limitation.

bamboozled 4y ago

Does anyone actually use street view for anything but novel purposes? I've used it maybe 5 times when I couldn't find the place I was looking for using the standard map view; However in nearly all cases, resorting to StreetView meant the place I was looking for was gone anyway.

dwater 4y ago
Yes, almost daily. When I'm going somewhere new, what does the front of the building look like? Where is there parking? How do I access the parking? What are the parking fees and restrictions? How visible is a landmark from the street? Which street is the entrance on? And that's just when I'm planning a trip, one of many use cases.
LancerSykera 4y ago
It was helpful in my truck driving days when going to customers I'd never been to before, and it was absolutely a daily tool in telecom construction/maintenance. Example - random sheriff's office calls in a phone line ripped down when I've got one foot out the door for the day. I pulled up the address on Streetview while she was explaining the scene to me, and it sure looked like coax on that side of the street, our lines were on the other side. Sure enough, 45 minute drive later I called the sheriff and told them to call the cable company. When you cover an area hundreds of square miles you can't go look at every job before sending a crew out. Pull it up on Streetview, even if the images are 10 years old it's probably still the same.
upbeat_general 4y ago
Yes, all the time. Before going to a place to see parking, how it looks, etc
maccard 4y ago
Not too long ago I had a leak that I suspected the previous owner had repaired. I was able to confirm with street view pictures that it's been repaired and patched over at least three separate times since 2008!
jeffbee 4y ago

everybodyknows 4y ago

Curious that no one else has mentioned what I find most addictive -- the unfiltered view of anthropology at street level spanning most of the world. Local fashion and architectural styles, history preserved or not, public safety infrastructure, private wealth versus public wealth, rule of law or local strong men, trust in law enforcement ... Clues everywhere, if you take the time to look.

irthomasthomas 4y ago
I had a project collecting photos from street view. https://instagram.com/noplacetosit https://instagram.com/noplacetosit I stopped using insta because the format was wrong for this project. One day I'll make a dedicated website for it... one day.

renewiltord 4y ago

Incredible stuff. The various Google properties have performed an incredible objective of recording our history. One could imagine the ad supported empire as this personal consumption tax that funds human information recording. Glorious.

wnevets 4y ago

Thinking about driving without google maps sounds so stressful.

Vladimof 4y ago
I strictly use OsmAnd~ on Android and it is a pain to use, specially in states where openstreetmap.org don't map street addresses like in Georgia. I often have to convert addresses to latitude/longitude first...

rob_c 4y ago

Great, now can we get it to scale with processing power. It was somehow more usable 10yr ago on most hardware...

upbeat_general 4y ago

I’m continually jealous of the street view dataset and disappointed there’s no public/free alternative. They provide API access but it’s very hamstrung and extremely expensive, making it essentially useless for anything except pulling up a single image of a location. It’s useless for any real mapping/localization/analysis project.

mvexel 4y ago
There’s Mapillary (acquired by meta but imagery is free to use in most cases) and KartaView (Grab). Both are crowdsourced platforms. https://www.mapillary.com/ https://www.mapillary.com/ https://kartaview.org/landing https://kartaview.org/landing
- upbeat_general 4y ago
  I didn't know about these! Still, since they're crowd-sourced from phone data, they only have a single view (no 360 in most places), inaccurate (or at least not reliably accurate) camera calibration, no accurate localization, and possibly most importantly, no LiDAR data. That's a lot of things that make it much harder to deal with and limit the potential compared to street view.

erichurkman 4y ago

And still no way to un-block street view from my address. It's the only house on the block that is blurred, which makes it _less_ private. (The previous owner had it blocked.)

MafellUser 4y ago
Can you explain why it's less private?

omega3 4y ago

Google had a very productive 5 year period where every year they were releasing massive groundbreaking products that were 10x better than competitors: Gmail, Maps, Street View, G Suite, Google Earth, Translate. Since then I'd struggle to count even 5 products that stand out: Android, Chrome and what else?

xnx 4y ago

Does anyone remember when Amazon (briefly) had a Street View competitor? Having a hard time finding any trace of it on the web.