An analysis of every word that’s visible on NYC’s streets (from 18 years of Google Street View Data). “The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city’s source code. For example, here’s all 111,290 matches for ‘pizza’, on a map.”
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This is incredible, a way to decode the city through its signage. Wow!
There's an outstanding talk from Yufeng Zhao from last year's !!Con explaining how he made the search engine. It's sad that this is the kind of innovation I would have expected Google itself to have built 15 years ago, and offered a free API to build on top of, but those days are long passed. Still, it's incredible that one engineer can now do this illicitly with scraped imagery using the OCR built into every Mac.
While reading The Pudding piece, I was thinking that if Street View hadn't been invented yet, there's in chance Google would be interested or even capable of making it happen.
Totally agree, their dreams of "organizing the world's information" are long dead. 10 years ago, I wrote about how Google gave up on that mission, with groups like Archive Team and the Internet Archive relentless pursuing it instead.
(BTW, I was typing the comment on my phone and misspelled the creator's name, it's Yufeng Zhao.)
((Corrected it for you...))
Amazing work: an analysis of words visible in NYC streetview https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/ (via @kottke.org)
The top 12 most common words are all part of what I'll call a "vocabulary of restriction" ("stop", "no", "do not", "only", "limit", etc.)
("But on the back side, it didn't say nothin'!")
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