So quick and so precise from a seemingly random piece of land in a random ass country. How??
In: 702
Like most other games, it’s really just practice and experience with the key giveaways. They recognize things that stand out, and are often unique to certain countries or regions. The color of the dirt, the traffic lines on the road, traffic bollards, color of license plates, the power pole design, the type of car the camera is mounted on, the quality of the photo itself, even the grass and trees can begin to look familiar once you play enough.
For example, in Tunisia there’s a specific type and color of follow car that was present during the photos being taken. In certain parts of Brazil there’s a specific type of reddish dirt that can give you a clue. In Colombia there’s a cross made of metal that supports the back of stop signs. In Mexico there’s octagonal power poles.
There’s a great website called geohints.com that catalogs all kinds of unique giveaways that can help you figure out where you are anywhere in the world!!
They say, “a picture speaks 1000 words”. These people simply listen to all those words. There’s lot of unique things like road signs, license plates, trees, etc that can identify where a picture was taken if you know what to look for.
So the answer isn’t ‘mexico is yellow’?
Anyone know a sub or resources I can find to learn the basics?
Experience and learning the metas.
You can break down any given location by “metas”. I.e, you’re dropped into a scene, what do you see? Bollards, signs, road lines, soil. Can be anything. There will be a meta for it. From there, you can reduce the amount of countries it can possibly be, until you land on the only country it can be.
Starting at a high level, learn what countries are covered in GeoGuessr. You can be fairly sure you’re never in Belarus, or Kazakhstan, or Egypt because there is no coverage. Great, so let’s keep narrowing down, get lower and lower level.
Next, what side of the road you’re driving on. Doesn’t take much to learn which countries drive on what side. So that’s another bunch of countries counted out.
Next, language. Scripts are fairly easy to suss out. Japanese, Korean are distinct enough to instantly tell them apart. There are certain characters only used in certain languages. And certain words used on signs only used in certain countries. Again, all learnable.
You get the picture… You’re basically playing “Guess who” but for countries.
There are all sorts of things you can “meta”. From soil colour (red soil + Portuguese = Brazil), architecture (dicks on buildings = Bhutan), licence plates (Blue EU strip on either side = Italy), vegetation (skinny birch trees = northern hemisphere, but coupled with lots of small white flowers by the road you’re most likely in Estonia), weather (winter coverage + EU plate = usually Hungary), scenery (if it looks Russian with massive mountains everywhere, it’s probably Kyrgyzstan), utility poles (if there is a black and yellow striped pattern at the bottom it’s Taiwan UNLESS it’s not touching the ground then it’s Japan)
There is quite literally a list of metas to learn [here](https://geohints.com/). A good player will know most of the stuff.
For the players who narrow it down to the very *street* they’re on. Either they know their meta’s, and get lucky, or they’re just mega-geniuses… That sort of skill is beyond me…
Lots of practice, and lots of learning.
You can find locations in geoguessr through a combination of context clues, and process of elimination.
There are lots of bits of information in geoguessr images that can tell you which country or region you’re in.
They include things like road markings, road signs, lamp-posts/street lighting, types of plant life, whether the sun is in the north or south, the specific google car used to take the images.
It also helps to know which countries don’t have google street view imagery, because these won’t be possible answers.
Once you know which country you’re in, you can use more specific landmarks like shapes of roads and junctions, natural landmarks like hills and mountains, and lots of other potential clues, to find the specific location.
So this is how you generally find each location.
When you play geoguessr for hundreds or thousands of hours, you stop having to think about a lot of this stuff.
You build up an intuition for what different countries look like, and you also get good at differentiating between regions that look very similar.
The best players will also explicitly learn specific things for each country, like shapes/colours of car licence plates, the colour and number of stripes painted on telephone poles and lampposts, the colours and types of road markings.
I watched a video on youtube where a pro explains how he knows and he’s looking at shit I, a simpleton, would never consider. Like the shape of the power pole. To the color of it. How many stripes are on the pedestrian crossing signs..
There’s so many minute details to things you’d never consider or notice even in your everyday life and they see it like it’s obvious.
Answer: A lot of answers explain high-level play (finding little clues like plants and signs) but the highest level players memorize a detail from each set of pictures in Geoguesser’s library. There are only so many set of pictures, and so the guesser will memorize things like the weather in the sky on the day of the set that was taken in some random town of Australia. Then as soon as they see the clouds in the sky, they know this is from the set of that random town in Australia. They will then click on the little town, and seem like sorcerers.
It is sorcery in that it is a feat of incredible memorization. But it is only just that.
What I found is that it does get easier the more you do it.
Like you start to recognize stuff about the environment, writing, scenery, road markings, stuff like that. You also get better at finding clues among none clues.
I can absolutely see how someone who does this for hundreds and thousands of hours get´s so good at it that it´s indistinguishable from cheating for the average viewer.
They might be able to suss out obvious clues but to narrow down specifically where it is in a country is called cheating.
Latest Answers