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Show HN: Search London StreetView panoramas by text
Inspired by All Text in NYC (https://alltext.nyc https://alltext.nyc) by Yufeng Zhang I thought I would replicate something similar for London.
A searchable tool that lets you explore text captured across Google Street View imagery in London; shop signs, posters, graffiti, van numbers etc
- dang 11mo agoRelated: Search all text in New York City - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883304 - Aug 2025 (116 comments) All text in Brooklyn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 - Aug 2024 (50 comments)
- n1xis10t 11mo agoWhat do you think it would take to do a global version? How much hard drive space does just London take up?
- dfworks 11mo agoHi Author here, This doesnt really answer your question but hopefully gives some insight into our process. The main bottlenecks were breaking the fisheye-style panoramas into different perspectives (so text was more readable), passing it to OCR and acquiring the panoramas as there isn't an official API. Because of the above, we constrained ourselves from the outset. For example, the spacings between panoramas was 50m, we didnt traverse residential roads that were less likely to have signage, we only used the most recent panorama for a location etc If I interpret global as without those constraints (5m spacings, every road, all historic panoramas) then I think the first problem you'll run into is being rate limited by Google. Compute may be able to solve the other problems but it would be very expensive.
- card_zero 11mo agoDoesn't find R Soles.
- tetris11 10mo agoDoesn't find Crystal Palace
- dfworks 10mo agoThere are around 50 results for Crystal Palace, Ill have a look through the logs to see what might have gone wrong Sadly no R Soles though (A shoe shop formerly in Chelsea but now online) - however, just searching for profanities does bring back some graffiti
- justincormack 10mo agoOnly 2 examples for "gay", no "ferodo", suspiciously few for "jaguar".
- rahimnathwani 10mo agoWhen I search "Colliers Wood", with or without quotation marks, each results match only one of the words.
- Gooblebrai 10mo agoAfter inputting a text from my phone, I just get a: Subscribe to Public Insights for just £29/month More data. Better value.
- tantalor 10mo agoFor [batman] it only finds this one poster, https://maps.app.goo.gl/jmJ1qhQsB3AetLiK8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/jmJ1qhQsB3AetLiK8 But doesn't find this billboard, probably because it doesn't actually contain the text "Batman". https://maps.app.goo.gl/nBoHArvaKZSgRH5W7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/nBoHArvaKZSgRH5W7 It should be able to match text query to anything, not just text.
- pbalau 10mo agoAlso it doesn't find the Batman statue in Leicester Square.
- dfworks 10mo agoWe were actually considering doing some object detection in a next run. It feels like there could potentially be some town planning applications like finding the distribution of rubbish bins vs litter on the floor
- swsieber 10mo agoHow do you get the data from google street view? Do they throttle scrapers?
- julius-fx 10mo agoPretty cool - searched for "DLR" and was stunned that I can actually walk through Bank Station :)