[HN Gopher] Show HN: Search London StreetView panoramas by text
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Show HN: Search London StreetView panoramas by text
Inspired by All Text in NYC (https://alltext.nyc) by Yufeng Zhang I
thought I would replicate something similar for London. A
searchable tool that lets you explore text captured across Google
Street View imagery in London; shop signs, posters, graffiti, van
numbers etc
Author : dfworks
Score : 20 points
Date : 2025-11-20 18:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (london.publicinsights.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (london.publicinsights.uk)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Search all text in New York City_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883304 - Aug 2025 (116
| comments)
|
| _All text in Brooklyn_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 - Aug 2024 (50
| comments)
| n1xis10t wrote:
| What do you think it would take to do a global version? How much
| hard drive space does just London take up?
| dfworks wrote:
| Hi Author here,
|
| This doesnt really answer your question but hopefully gives
| some insight into our process.
|
| The main bottlenecks were breaking the fisheye-style panoramas
| into different perspectives (so text was more readable),
| passing it to OCR and acquiring the panoramas as there isn't an
| official API.
|
| Because of the above, we constrained ourselves from the outset.
| For example, the spacings between panoramas was 50m, we didnt
| traverse residential roads that were less likely to have
| signage, we only used the most recent panorama for a location
| etc
|
| If I interpret global as without those constraints (5m
| spacings, every road, all historic panoramas) then I think the
| first problem you'll run into is being rate limited by Google.
| Compute may be able to solve the other problems but it would be
| very expensive.
| card_zero wrote:
| Doesn't find R Soles.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Doesn't find Crystal Palace
| dfworks wrote:
| There are around 50 results for Crystal Palace, Ill have a
| look through the logs to see what might have gone wrong
|
| Sadly no R Soles though (A shoe shop formerly in Chelsea but
| now online) - however, just searching for profanities does
| bring back some graffiti
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| When I search "Colliers Wood", with or without quotation marks,
| each results match only one of the words.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| After inputting a text from my phone, I just get a:
|
| Subscribe to Public Insights for just PS29/month More data.
| Better value.
| tantalor wrote:
| For [batman] it only finds this one poster,
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/jmJ1qhQsB3AetLiK8
|
| But doesn't find this billboard, probably because it doesn't
| actually contain the text "Batman".
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/nBoHArvaKZSgRH5W7
|
| It should be able to match text query to anything, not just text.
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(page generated 2025-11-21 23:01 UTC)