I’m not talking about finding an address you’ve never been to, but somewhere familiar, like your house, parents’ house, place of business, favorite vacation spot, etc. Can you start with a map of the entire continent (or world) and zoom right in to those places without searching around?
I can do it with my home, ex-GF’s home, workplace, old apartment, and two vacation spots. I can find both houses I lived in growing up, but with difficulty. I can find my high school. I can’t, for the life of me, find the houses of any family members.
Someone brought this game up in a thread a few months back. I remember doing decently, albeit not perfectly. And I’ve moved since then, so it’s time for another try.
For me it’s a passtime. At first I had a little trouble, but now I just know the landmarks to look for. I got so good at it that the last time I flew, I had a true “I can see my house from here” moment.
Oh man, I get really frustrated if I can’t quickly zoom to a familiar place. It’s super easy for place that’s very familiar (excepting some places from childhood), and not too difficult for anywhere else I’ve been within a month or two. Being a thorough map and geography geek in all aspects of life, I keep constant mental note of my location, and if it’s somewhere new I’ll almost always go and find it on a map afterward if not right away.
Are there people that find this hard for places they have lived or work? It used to be a lot harder when the satellite photos weren’t as nearly as up to date but it is pretty easy now. I just located my car that I had last year at one place and a regular dog house I built a few years ago at another house with no problems or missteps. In fairness, the house that I grew up in used to be a problem because it was in a rural area and didn’t have a street address and it was set way back off of any public roads and surrounded by woods. The satellite photos were there but the resolution was terrible so I just had to guess which blotchy square it was but it is there now plain as day along with a bunch of other things.
I’ve always been a map freak. I can find virtually any place I’ve been too just by zooming in on it manually. Because I’ve now taken to geo-tagging my photos with HoudahGeo (including those from the beginning of time) I’ve become quite adept at it. Now if I’ve not been to a place (or only parachuted there without any geographical references), it becomes a bit more difficult.
I like to search for movie locations. Usually all I have to go on is a few disparate clues, and then I spend about an hour searching around likely landmarks.
I use maps all the time in my line of work (I have produced my share of flood inundation mapping also), so this is a very easy thing for me to do.
I’m not surprised that folks sometimes have a hard time of it, because not everyone has good spatial reckoning. Also some might think of “up” as being oriented looking south, and Google maps is the opposite.
Like many others in this thread, I manually find places I’ve been or lived pretty regularly. Much like Pig Boy, I very often find new places I’ve visited soon after the fact - it’s usually not that hard.
It seems fairly natural and easy to me, but I know some very capable people for whom it’s not. Different people process information in different ways, and this way apparently plays to my strengths…
My dad was a pilot, and every now and then we’d have reason to go flying in a small plane. I had plenty of literal “I can see my house from here” moments when I was young. Are they really so rare for everyone else?
I can find almost any place I’ve ever been by zooming in to Google Maps. It feels vaguely unsettling to me to remember a place and not remember where it is or how I got there.
They’re rare for me because it’s rare for a plane I’m on to fly west out of the city. (Strangely enough, it was a direct flight to Florida.) And on those rare occasions it might be overcast or I’m on the wrong side of the plane. But Google Maps has helped a lot, since now I know the shape of the reservoir by sight and proximity to the river.
My personal woot! moment came when I was exploring in Google Earth. I located my boyhood home, where I lived when I was 5, back in the 1960s. In Taiwan.
I haven’t been to Taiwan since the mid-1970s, I had no idea whether our view was to the east or to the west, I had no clue where our property was in relation to the main city of Taipei, and the outskirts of Taipei where we lived went from rural to urban.
That reminds me, arriving at the airport is kind of like using Google maps: Oh, we’re on the southwest approach today. That’s Ford World Headquarters, that’s Hines Drive, that building’s the strip club on the corner of Michigan and Lonyo.
Airliners barely count. You’ve got a tiny little window, and unless you live within shouting distance of the airport you’re probably at a couple thousand feet before you can see your house.
Go up in a little Cessna sometime; maybe even sit in the front seat. Fly over your house on purpose. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Sure. It’s trivial. Just punch in the GPS coordinates in WGS84 datum. If you punch in down to a tenth of an arc-second, it will instantly point to a specific manhole cover.
But seriously. If I can find my way there on the ground without a map, I can find it in the satellite pictures within a couple of minutes.
I find it is a more interesting game if you turn off the street names. It is also fun to go to bing maps and use the bird’s eye view, if it’s available for your area.
I was trying to find my childhood house that way and I noticed that a barge going down the river. When I looked closer it was longer than the Super Walmart nearby.
Having spent nearly all of my time on the east coast of the US, it’s pretty trivially easy, because there are a ton of natural landmarks visible on the continent view that let me know roughly where things are. If I’d grown up in Kansas, it would probably be much harder.
I must be missing something. What’s the challenge? I know where I lived, worked, went to school, etc. So of course I can find them. How would it be possible to not find them? Are you saying I’m not allowed to slide the map around, and just use the zoom? Do I have to turn streets off? Map view or satellite view?
I even found my aunt’s work, even though I’ve never been there, so either this is trivially easy for everyone or I’m not doing it right.