https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/

I searched for "Google" expecting no results and I ended up with a heatmap of every streetview pic ever.

https://www.alltext.nyc/map?q=google&sm=e&m_lat=40.7532&m_lo...

This write-up about the site is also fascinating: https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/

Tangent, there are these videos on YT of people walking through cities, the ones I like in particular are through Tokyo/Japan. I was thinking it would be cool to build a 3D map from that, it is possible but not my field. I think some companies have done it too. But there is a lot of data on that. Maybe free robot training (walking through a crowd like delivery).

I believe it's a combo of SLAM/photogrammery/VIO but you don't have an IMU so that part would have to be estimated from the video. Maybe the flickering of the lights with the frames probably too fast.

ex. https://youtu.be/ohlzQNCpT7M?si=zH764fDlHqPKyjin&t=537 ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZi2GeEGdvM

This would be an interesting additional layer for google maps search which I often find to be lacking. For example, I was recently travelling in Gran Canaria and looking for places selling artesan coffee in the south (spoiler: only one in a hotel which took me almost half an hour to even find). Searching for things like "pourover" and "v60" is usually my go-to signal but unless the cafe mentions this in their description or its mentioned in reviews it's hard to find. I don't think they even index the text on the photos customers take (which will often include the coffee menu behind the cashier).

GitHub of the person who prepared the data. I am curious how much compute was needed for NY. I would love to do it for my metro but I suspect it is way beyond my budget.

https://github.com/yz3440

(The commenters below are right. It is the Maps API, not compute, that I should worry about. Using the free tier, it would have taken the author years to download all tiles. I wish I had their budget!)

OCR mistakes can be hilarious. This was read as "STAR FUCKS COFFEE":

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.785843,-73.95097,3a,20y,56.6...

Interesting how they censor the word "fuck" like it's going to affect your brain if you read it fully spelled or something

Searching "Fool" gives a lot of OCR errors, some of which are due to occlusions: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=fool&p=3

"Surgery of the Fool" is my personal favorite.

This is a super cool project. But it would be 10x cooler if they had generated CLIP or some other embeddings for the images, so you could search for text but also do semantic vector search like "people fighting", "cats and dogs, "red tesla", "clown", "child playing with dog", etc.

Related. Others?

All Text in NYC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367029 - Dec 2024 (4 comments)

All text in Brooklyn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 - Aug 2024 (50 comments)

This would probably make John Wilson's job a lot easier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_To_with_John_Wilson)

Reminds me of NY Cerebro, semantic search across New York City's hundreds of public street cameras: https://nycerebro.vercel.app/ (e.g. search for "scaffolding")

This must be great for OSINT. I wonder if intelligence agencies already have something like this for the whole world.

The creator gave a talk that has more details on how it was done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfODe92DzLU

IIRC he found a way to download streetview images without paying, and used the OCR built-in to macOS (which is really good).

I feel like street-view data is surprisingly underused for geospatial intelligence.

With current-gen multimodal LLMs, you could very easily query and plot things like "broken windows," "houses with front-yard fences," "double-parked cars," "faded lane markers," etc. that are difficult to generally derive from other sources.

For any reasonably-sized area, I'd guess the largest bottleneck is actually the Maps API cost vs the LLM inference. And ideally we'd have better GIS products for doing this sort of analysis smoothly.

The first text I thought to search was "as old as hills". https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=as+old+as+hills

As seen on the sign of a liquor store near where I used to live. More info revealed https://lostnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-mystery-of-...

this is why i love HN.. dang it even found my childhood bagels store in Queens! https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=bagels+jackson+heights <heart>

hah, it can find all the KEST GAK stickers now: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=kest

First search for SAMO!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAMO

But difficult to figure out if any of them are original.

I liked this one, but it is most likely newer. It is on top of the City-as-school building where Basquiat attended, so it is probably a tribute.

https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/DZz7Gp1PtROe78ailUpvlA?o=11...

Is there an API? I'd love to make a music video like the one in https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/

There's a lot of PIZZA in New York City!

I'm not sure it's working well.

https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=linux

Surprisingly, sushi is huge in Manhattan and not so much in the outer boroughs. My relative assessment from looking at the heatmap: https://www.alltext.nyc/map?q=sushi&m_lat=40.7313&m_lon=-73....

Also - a huge difference between UES and UWS, with more sushi spots on UES. Maybe its denser?

All the dotcoms in NYC: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=.com&sm=e

“Sex” -> https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/-FQLvskTncufoBXtcfi0aA?o=66...

This is exceedingly fun.

A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.

Found the classic EE UNSH (Embee Sunshade Co) which used to be EM EE UNSH (at least in a photo of mine taken 18 years ago) https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/SSQGgn90zcClm6MdOlDOsA?o=31...

The next step should be to create a Street-View-style website for navigating around New York City, where only the text is visible and everything else is left blank/white.

Finally, this guy’s OCR-friendly long game pays off! https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=BNE

Awesome project.

My only suggestion would be to remove duplicates. Many of the items are just the same thing from different angles. Of course, this is a tough technical challenge to solve that most likely cannot rely on location alone.

Easy to find a favorite graffiti artist of mine this way: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Hektad

Surprisingly I can't seem to find any doors with notices from the sheriffs department or building department embarrassingly plastered on them. Am I misremembering how these are phrased verbatim or are certain things censored?

This would tremendously help in making of a "Lavish" music video: https://youtu.be/flYgpeWsC2E

37,975 bagels in nyc! *w/ some dupes https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=bagels

I immediately looked up "Blob Dylan"

My explorations "obey", "injured?", "fuck trump", "fuck obama"

The word search for "fart" shows the tool's limits. No entry I saw actually said the word fart, but was listed as doing so -- "fart nawor" (hearts around the world irl), the penny farting (the penny farthing irl), etc.

I _love_ this but it's pretty bad. I searched for "Morgue" and one of the matches was the "2025 Google" watermark which it thought was "Big Morgue"

Again, a complex problem and I love it...

Some entertaining misreads:

https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Sex

amazing. look up some graffiti writers you know

As others have mentioned, the idea is so cool, but the text recognition is abysmal.

Search for “fart” if you want a good laugh.

I typed in "fart" and none of the results on the first page were actually the word "fart".

Searching for “foo” is humorous, it’s mostly restaurants with signs that say “food” but the “d” is cropped.

I searched "norse" , but it didn't give me any good result at all, lots of hallucinations when you check the sources it found.

520 matches on "hotdog" 8084 matches on "massage" in no particular order

Reporting a bug : 4123262 matches for Google.

This is pretty cool! I'm curious what was used for OCR? Amazon Mechanical Burp?

I like it. I am hoping there is a similar one for Austin, TX

“Andrew Yang” “Mamdani” “Eric Adams”

Hope he gets to enjoy the freedom of soccer balls hitting the wall outside his flat 16/7.

I could spend hours sending nonsensical queries to this site (but probably shouldn't).

Enviable idea.

https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=this+is+not

I’d love to see a mash up of this and the historical street view archive from the city archives.

Pretty cool

Cool concept, but the accuracy seems quite low. The hits for "pedo" are pretty hilarious, though! https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=pedo&p=2

When you search 'google'... you'll see... lol

PERU ANA

"$1 Pizza"

Gosh! Maybe one of these days someone will take time off from this cultural wonderment to construct a simple, easy to use, text-to-audio.file program - you know, install, paste in some text, convert, start-up a player - so that the blind can listen to texts that aren't recorded in audiobooks. Without a CS degree.