Yeah.
Things I learned from GeoGuessr:
South Africa looks remarkably like Australia.
Eastern Canada looks remarkably like Scandinavia.
I can identify the UK just from a look at a wall.
Russia and the other Slavic states aren’t nearly as big as they seem. (Seriously…get a random bunch of Cyrillic, and pop the tag down in a random place in Eastern Europe, and you’re likely to be closer than a random shot in the US, Canada, or Brazil.)
I just got within 7.778 km for aa point on the Spanish coast. God is it addicting, but I’ve already seen some duplicates, I astounded my wife with a guess for western Brazil that I had seen previously.
I prefer to play that way, by trying to figure out where I am by signs and landmarks and using Google. It’s fun because it’s more detective work and less guesswork, but since that’s “cheating” the bar for what you consider a successful game should probably be much higher, like getting the exact spot. I’ve scored a bullseye on a few and gotten within a meter in Brazil, the U.S., Norway, Japan, etc., but I’ve never even come close in Russia. I found a radio station once and thought I had it and was still hundreds of miles away.
I kind of go back and forth on using Google. Some rounds I do it, some rounds I don’t. The best are when you have a spot on earth that’s just a rural road with no signs, no cars, just a stretch of highway.
Brazil seems really over represented, the same for Australia, Sweden and Norway. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen much from the UK or anything from India.
Mrs. Cretin got to within three meters. Small town in Sicily.
23 meters for a park in Australia using the cheating method.
I never took Russian in high school but once when I was bored I borrowed a textbook from the teacher and memorized the Cyrillic alphabet. Twenty-five years later it finally comes in handy when playing a silly online game. I can’t always get close when I get sent to Russia, but I do a lot better than if I didn’t know the alphabet.
Lord knows I tried - I don’t have Cyrillic memorized, but I painstakingly transliterated roadsigns, advertising, and everything else I saw from Cyrillic to English longhand on a legal pad like a meth tweaking codebreaker and still couldn’t manage to figure out where I was within several hundred miles. I guess my encyclopedic lack of familiarity with Russian geography didn’t help.
13 meters at an easily identified location in Woolgoolga, NSW, Australia that I Googled the hell out of.
The very next location (this was today) was a dirt path next to a wire fence that had no buildings, cars, or signage for a kilometer in either direction. I finally guessed based on the vegetation and landscape that it was South Africa. I was right, but 700 km away.
I have a degree in Russian studies and lived in Russia a couple of years and it all lead to two of my greatest moments: in the first, there was a town sports center in western Russia that had the name of the town written on the building in Russian and a train station in Siberia that I had actually been to. In both cases I got the town right and got pretty close, but just couldn’t be bothered to zoom in enough to find the exact spot; student loans well spent.
I just played and my second placement was right in front of Pasadena City Hall. City vehicle parked in front that said “Pasadena” on it, and a big building with “City Hall” on it. I was within 3 meters.
1 meter on a street corner in Clermont, QSL, Australia. Cars driving on left and Post Office were best clues.
1 meter on a street corner in Clermont, QSL, Australia. Cars driving on left and Post Office were best clues.
I will spend hours with Street View, Google Earth, and Geoguesser up because I am ridiculously obsessed. I usually come within a meter if I have anything at all to go on. Sometimes the view is just too foggy or it’s unending dirt road. Rarely it will be some small path that meets itself so unless you’re familiar with that exact area you’d never know it. After a while you start getting used to the color of haze in the lense, like in a lot of Aussie pics it all looks reddish.
Sigh. Yes of course I meant mile not meter.
Americans don’t know what meters are!
0.013 km or 42.651 feet.
It was an intersection in Jua Brazil.
I wish I had saved it, but in the 2nd game I played, it started me out next to a dock with a cruise ship. I turned around and saw a sign that said, “Welcome to Ketchikan”. I think I was less than 1 km.
0.002 KM (that is, about 2 meters, or 6 feet) in Frankfurt.
That was part of a >30200-point session that was marred by my being off by 38KM in the middle of nowhere in Saskatchewan, where there were two virtually identical “y” intersections. All of the others were within 10s of meters. I’m not sure why three of the locations were within about 250KM of Saskatoon, but I can tell you that it is WIDE OPEN country up there, with nothing to see for miles and miles of unsigned roads.
First one today was 500.644 km. I got the state right: Montana.
Got lucky with my first one. Immediately knew I was on a rural road in the Midwest so I guessed the Dyersville, Iowa, area.
Turned out I was near the small town of Armstrong, Iowa, 306km west.
