[HN Gopher] Search all text in New York City
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Search all text in New York City
https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/
Author : Kortaggio
Score : 538 points
Date : 2025-08-13 00:17 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alltext.nyc)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alltext.nyc)
| WorldPeas wrote:
| hah, it can find all the KEST GAK stickers now:
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=kest
| JackFr wrote:
| Can't find me any REVS tags.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(graffiti_artist)
|
| Instead shows me thousands of "Rev"
| ofrzeta wrote:
| You need to toogle "exact match". Then you will find a some,
| mostly together with COST. It's not a lot, though, probably a
| sign of a bygone era.
| adrianparsons wrote:
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=ana+peru
| Kortaggio wrote:
| This write-up about the site is also fascinating:
| https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/
| dang wrote:
| Added to top text. Thanks!
| Antrikshy wrote:
| The Pudding is one of the best things on the internet today.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| dfworks wrote:
| I have a London one also if anyone is interested!
|
| https://london.publicinsights.uk
| dang wrote:
| Nice! If you want to email hn@ycombinator.com we could send
| you a repost invite for
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44664046 - but please
| wait a while first. The trick is to let enough time go by for
| the hivemind caches to clear. Then everything old becomes new
| again :) - usually 2-3 months is a good interval...
| m_kos wrote:
| 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!)
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I would wager the compute for the OCR is cheap. Just get a
| beefy local desktop PC, if it runs overnight or even takes a
| week that's fine.
|
| It's the Google Maps API costs that will sink your project if
| you can't get them waived as art:
|
| https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/
|
| Not sure how many panoramas there are in New York or your
| metro, but if it's over the free tier you're talking thousands
| of dollars.
| ks2048 wrote:
| It says 8 million images. So, 13.2 images/second for one week.
|
| I'm wondering about more the data - did they use Google's API
| or work with Google to use the data?
| daemonologist wrote:
| The linked article mentions that they ingested 8 million panos
| - even if they're scraping the dynamic viewer that's $30k just
| in street view API fees (the static image API would probably be
| at least double that due to the low per-call resolution).
|
| OCR I'd expect to be comparatively cheap, if you weren't in a
| hurry - a consumer GPU running PaddlePaddle server can do about
| 4 MP per second. If you spent a few grand on hardware that
| might work out to 3-6 months of processing, depending on the
| resolution per pano and size of your model.
| swores wrote:
| Their write up (linked at top of page below main link, and in
| a comment) says:
|
| > " _media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-
| available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer
| program that transcribes text within the images (anyone can
| access these Street View images; you don't even need a Google
| account!)._ "
|
| Maybe they used multiple IPs / devices and didn't want to
| mention doing something technically naughty to get around
| Google's free limits, or maybe they somehow didn't hit a
| limit doing it as a single user? Either way, it doesn't sound
| like they had to pay if they only mention not needing an
| account.
|
| (Or maybe they just thought people didn't need to know that
| they had to pay, and that readers would just want the free
| access to look up a few images, rather than a whole city's
| worth?)
| Antrikshy wrote:
| Any possibility this is user-submitted panoramas, and maybe
| they don't charge for those?
| puppymaster wrote:
| i just hashout out the details with claude. apparently it would
| cost me ~8k USD to retrieve all Taipei street images from gmap
| api with 3m density. Expensive, but not impossible.
| tills13 wrote:
| 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...
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| As others have mentioned, the idea is so cool, but the text
| recognition is abysmal.
| lelandfe wrote:
| It worked perfectly on the two tests I tried: the GSA building
| in SoHo, and BKLYN Blend in Bedstuy.
| redeyedtreefrog wrote:
| Agreed, how in 2025 is an OCR model reading this as "Bobbins"?
|
| https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/z0SOvmU-5_yuspnsFvjVuA?o=16...
| theodric wrote:
| 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
| wilson090 wrote:
| This would probably make John Wilson's job a lot easier
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_To_with_John_Wilson)
| shibeprime wrote:
| 520 matches on "hotdog" 8084 matches on "massage" in no
| particular order
| egypturnash wrote:
| I typed in "fart" and none of the results on the first page were
| actually the word "fart".
| dumbfounder wrote:
| I also did this. But I wasn't mad, I was amused.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Same really.
| ya1sec wrote:
| amazing. look up some graffiti writers you know
| lildvlpr wrote:
| I immediately looked up "Blob Dylan"
| brentm wrote:
| Pretty cool
| cobbzilla wrote:
| Searching for "foo" is humorous, it's mostly restaurants with
| signs that say "food" but the "d" is cropped.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Search for "fart" if you want a good laugh.
| daemonologist wrote:
| 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.
| Benjammer wrote:
| I found "intertwining" with a score of 3 also. Two instances of
| the word on the same sign and then a false positive third pic.
| koolba wrote:
| One match: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Buxom
| cmwelsh wrote:
| First lucky try, "calisthenics" scores a verified 1. It would
| be interesting if there was a Parquet file of the raw data.
|
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Calisthenics
| tkgally wrote:
| "perplexed" gets one hit. It appears in a Bible quotation on an
| abortion rights poster on West 77th Street. Someone is sleeping
| beneath the poster:
|
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=perplexed
| rags2riches wrote:
| At first glance, there's plenty of grog to be had in NYC. But
| sailors will be disappointed. It all seems to be OCR errors of
| "Groceries" or the "Google" watermarks.
| rags2riches wrote:
| There's even "West Indian Grog" to be found! Surely, that
| must be the rum based drink? https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama
| /63DKJbMdVQY8ah6jgobU9g?o=85...
| lrivers wrote:
| Sloth returned surprisingly many results, 92 Deviant returned 5
| (cmon NY, do better) Sherpa five but two false positives, two
| Gap ads about Sherpa fleece, two genuine including Sherpa
| consulting which seems pretty niche Defenestrate got zero
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| 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.
| repeekad wrote:
| I think the issue is the compute power needed for good voice
| models is far from free just in hardware and electricity, so
| any good text to audio solution likely needs to cost some
| money. Wiring up Google vertex AI text to speech or the aws
| equivalent is probably something chat gpt could walk most
| people through even without a CS degree, a simple python script
| you could authenticate from a terminal command, and would maybe
| cost a couple bucks for personal usage
|
| A service you can pay for of that simplicity probably doesn't
| exist because there are other tools that integrate better with
| how the blind interact with computers, I doubt it's copy and
| pasting text, and those tools are likely more robust albeit
| expensive
| IncRnd wrote:
| This is pretty cool! I'm curious what was used for OCR? Amazon
| Mechanical Burp?
| ninju wrote:
| There's a lot of PIZZA in New York City!
| andsoitis wrote:
| > There's a lot of PIZZA in New York City!
|
| New York is consistently rated alongside Naples as having the
| best pizza in the world.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| 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).
| vincnetas wrote:
| TIL : Shortcuts.app has an "Extract Text from Image" action.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| 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.
| jacobajit wrote:
| 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.
| bongard wrote:
| Yes. I work at a company that is using street view to identify
| high-rise apartments with dangerous cladding for the UK gov.
| Also could use it for grouping nearby properties which were
| clearly built together and share features. Helps spread known
| information about buildings. You can also get the models to
| predict age and sometimes even things like double-glazing.
| dfworks wrote:
| I made this - https://london publicinsights.uk as well as
| operate a public records aggregator that has indexed, amongst
| other things, planning applications. I wonder if it could be
| of use?
| zxh wrote:
| When you search 'google'... you'll see... lol
| rkagerer wrote:
| Some entertaining misreads:
|
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Sex
| tomglynch wrote:
| "$1 Pizza"
| domo__knows wrote:
| PERU ANA
| rocauc wrote:
| 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")
| silverpiranha wrote:
| Ah yeah, this was the winning project at an NVIDIA and Vercel
| hackathon awhile back
| harikb wrote:
| What is surprising to me is how low res the public street
| camera are. Combine that with the glare of car headlights ...
| :(
| NtG_UK wrote:
| Finally, this guy's OCR-friendly long game pays off!
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=BNE
| vincnetas wrote:
| what's BNE?
| k1t wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNE_(artist)
|
| _BNE is an anonymous graffiti artist known for stickers that
| read "BNE" or "BNE was here". The artist has left their mark
| in countries throughout the world, including the United
| States, Canada, Asia, Romania, Australia, Europe, and South
| America. "His accent and knowledge of local artists suggest
| he is from New York."_
| querist9 wrote:
| I like it. I am hoping there is a similar one for Austin, TX
| djha-skin wrote:
| 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.
| nedt wrote:
| Under the search button there is a drop down. Enable "exact
| match" and filter low ocr confidence. Still has many false
| positives, but you'll also see the "fart king".
| vincnetas wrote:
| My explorations "obey", "injured?", "fuck trump", "fuck obama"
| komali2 wrote:
| I was trying for various graffiti slogans, turns out the
| anarchy "(A)" is basically the most difficult thing in the
| world to search for lol, other political ideologies much easier
| to find. It did amusingly lead me to search for just "anarchy"
| which led to 4 pages of bus ads for a show by the "Sons of
| Anarchy" guy.
|
| EDIT: Lol, "communism" leads to 39 pages of Shen Yun
| billboards.
| hbarka wrote:
| "Andrew Yang" "Mamdani" "Eric Adams"
| komali2 wrote:
| Mamdani is just one dude's gynecology clinic. I wonder when the
| data was pulled?
|
| edit: I found mentions of Gaza bombings and there's cars with
| like #gaza on it so my guess is sometime in the last 2 years.
|
| I could of course look it up but this is a game now for me,
| like when I found a hella old atlas in a library and tried to
| figure out the date it was published just by looking at the
| maps.
| dmje wrote:
| "Sex" ->
| https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/-FQLvskTncufoBXtcfi0aA?o=66...
| 4782294782 wrote:
| Hope he gets to enjoy the freedom of soccer balls hitting the
| wall outside his flat 16/7.
| baby wrote:
| Interesting how they censor the word "fuck" like it's going to
| affect your brain if you read it fully spelled or something
| sksrbWgbfK wrote:
| Is it? I can lookup that word and see it in the pictures. Or is
| it the StreetView version that has been censored somewhere?
| yorwba wrote:
| The pudding.cool article has a link labeled "View the map of
| "F*ck"" but it leads to a search for "fuck" instead. If you
| search for "F*ck", you find gems such as "CONTRACTOR F CK-UP"
| https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/KhzY08H72wV2ldXamZU5HA?o=76.
| .. (Strategically placed pole obscuring the word.)
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| SEO, or family friendly values (maybe both!). Related: no
| swearing in the first minute of YouTube videos.
| rancidcrab wrote:
| That's been changed (again). Iirc most swear words are now
| fine wherever they are in the vid.
| baby wrote:
| Is that a youtube policy? It's so weird.
| fifilura wrote:
| 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...
| jdee wrote:
| The first search I did was IRAK, the second, FAILE. Ghosts of
| graf.
| ragazzina wrote:
| 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.
| ivape wrote:
| I'd love to see a mash up of this and the historical street view
| archive from the city archives.
| deanc wrote:
| 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).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Seems like searching for V60 would get you a lot of Volvos! Is
| anyone photographing these words in coffee shops that would let
| them be surfaced here?
| deanc wrote:
| Yeah, that can be somewhat of a problem in bigger cities ;-)
| It's pretty common for people to have taken a photo of the
| menu in cafes but as mentioned it seems google isn't
| ingesting or surfacing that information for text search.
| mockingloris wrote:
| It could be. If they didn't think about it, now they can.
|
| Could easily seeing myself come back to this.
|
| |
|
| +-- Dey well; Be well
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| 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
| henkytanky wrote:
| I searched "norse" , but it didn't give me any good result at
| all, lots of hallucinations when you check the sources it found.
| artur_makly wrote:
| 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>
| pxeger1 wrote:
| This must be great for OSINT. I wonder if intelligence agencies
| already have something like this for the whole world.
| artur_makly wrote:
| 37,975 bagels in nyc! *w/ some dupes
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=bagels
| r24y wrote:
| 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.
| dc10tonite wrote:
| Same with "fart," and it's an absolute delight:
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=fart
|
| "Fart bird special" is pretty funny, and "staff farting only"
| might be my favorite. Other good ones: "BECAUSE THE FART
| NEEDS," "Juice Fart," "WHOLESALE FARTS"
| msephton wrote:
| 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...
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| All the dotcoms in NYC:
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=.com&sm=e
| zniturah wrote:
| Reporting a bug : 4123262 matches for Google.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| This would tremendously help in making of a "Lavish" music video:
| https://youtu.be/flYgpeWsC2E
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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?
| OG_BME wrote:
| Is there an API? I'd love to make a music video like the one in
| https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/
| ge96 wrote:
| 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
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| There was a guy a long time ago, who did YT videos of the tech
| markets in Tokyo and it was really surprising some of the best
| places to get parts for smartphones or robots were completely
| non-descript buildings in the heart of the city. He
| specifically went to places that most people wouldn't know
| about unless you really had great local information.
|
| If someone were to do what you're saying, it would be a huge
| win for people visiting and being able to find these places. I
| would love to see this.
| ge96 wrote:
| You reminded me of Strange Parts who was in China, able to
| pick up random stuff like an iPhone motherboard from a lady
| selling it on the street.
| quinncom wrote:
| Do you think those videos of tech markets in Tokyo are still
| online? I would enjoy seeing them.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Similarly it would be great to have a tool to do it with
| stills, like reconstruct a floor plan based on real estate
| photos. Even if it were partially manually, it would be pretty
| handy.
| ge96 wrote:
| Matterport seems to do this at least offering you a 3D tour
| of say an apt complex
|
| edit: although this is not what you're describing, this is
| literally using a 360 camera
|
| Apple's Room Plan is pretty legit measuring walls/objects in
| a room but also requires being in the room/moving it around
| stevenking86 wrote:
| Easy to find a favorite graffiti artist of mine this way:
| https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Hektad
| anonu wrote:
| 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.
| anonu wrote:
| 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?
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(page generated 2025-08-13 23:01 UTC)