7 ms·
Search all text in New York City
https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/ https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/
- WorldPeas 1y agohah, it can find all the KEST GAK stickers now: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=kest https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=kest
- JackFr 1y agoCan’t find me any REVS tags. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(graffiti_artist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(graffiti_artist) Instead shows me thousands of “Rev“
- ofrzeta 1y agoYou 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 1y agohttps://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=ana+peru https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=ana+peru
- baby 1y agoInteresting how they censor the word "fuck" like it's going to affect your brain if you read it fully spelled or something
- sksrbWgbfK 1y agoIs it? I can lookup that word and see it in the pictures. Or is it the StreetView version that has been censored somewhere?
- yorwba 1y agoThe 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=76237152 https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/KhzY08H72wV2ldXamZU5HA?o=76... (Strategically placed pole obscuring the word.)
- vgb2k18 1y agoSEO, or family friendly values (maybe both!). Related: no swearing in the first minute of YouTube videos.
- rancidcrab 1y agoThat's been changed (again). Iirc most swear words are now fine wherever they are in the vid.
- baby 1y agoIs that a youtube policy? It's so weird.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- tomglynch 1y ago"$1 Pizza"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Kortaggio 1y agoThis write-up about the site is also fascinating: https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/ https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/
- dang 1y agoRelated. Others? All Text in NYC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367029 - Dec 2024 (4 comments) All text in Brooklyn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 - Aug 2024 (50 comments)
- dfworks 1y agoI have a London one also if anyone is interested! https://london.publicinsights.uk https://london.publicinsights.uk
- dang 1y agoNice! If you want to email hn@ycombinator.com we could send you a repost invite for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44664046 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 1y agoGitHub 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 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 1y agoI 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/ 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 1y agoIt 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoTheir 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?)
- tills13 1y agoI _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 1y agoAs others have mentioned, the idea is so cool, but the text recognition is abysmal.
- lelandfe 1y agoIt worked perfectly on the two tests I tried: the GSA building in SoHo, and BKLYN Blend in Bedstuy.
- redeyedtreefrog 1y agoAgreed, how in 2025 is an OCR model reading this as "Bobbins"? https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/z0SOvmU-5_yuspnsFvjVuA?o=16554662 https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/z0SOvmU-5_yuspnsFvjVuA?o=16...
- theodric 1y agoCool concept, but the accuracy seems quite low. The hits for "pedo" are pretty hilarious, though! https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=pedo&p=2 https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=pedo&p=2
- wilson090 1y agoThis would probably make John Wilson's job a lot easier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_To_with_John_Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_To_with_John_Wilson)
- shibeprime 1y ago520 matches on "hotdog" 8084 matches on "massage" in no particular order
- egypturnash 1y agoI typed in "fart" and none of the results on the first page were actually the word "fart".
- throwaway984393 1y ago[dead]
- dumbfounder 1y agoI also did this. But I wasn’t mad, I was amused.
- egypturnash 1y agoSame really.
- ya1sec 1y agoamazing. look up some graffiti writers you know
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lildvlpr 1y agoI immediately looked up "Blob Dylan"
- brentm 1y agoPretty cool
- cobbzilla 1y agoSearching for “foo” is humorous, it’s mostly restaurants with signs that say “food” but the “d” is cropped.
- dumbfounder 1y agoSearch for “fart” if you want a good laugh.
- daemonologist 1y agoThis 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoOne match: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Buxom https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Buxom
- cmwelsh 1y agoFirst 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 https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Calisthenics
- tkgally 1y ago“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 https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=perplexed
- rags2riches 1y agoAt 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 1y agoThere's even "West Indian Grog" to be found! Surely, that must be the rum based drink? https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/63DKJbMdVQY8ah6jgobU9g?o=85220331 https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/63DKJbMdVQY8ah6jgobU9g?o=85...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 8bitsrule 1y agoGosh! 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoThis is pretty cool! I'm curious what was used for OCR? Amazon Mechanical Burp?
- ninju 1y agoThere's a lot of PIZZA in New York City!
- andsoitis 1y ago> 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.
- supermatt 1y agoRated by who? There is no way on earth anyone who has tried both would rate them similarly.
- AlexeyBelov 1y agoSo true. New York is the capital of pizza basically.
- jjwiseman 1y agoThe creator gave a talk that has more details on how it was done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfODe92DzLU 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 1y agoTIL : Shortcuts.app has an "Extract Text from Image" action.
- danintheden 1y ago[dead]
- jjwiseman 1y agoThis 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoYes. 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoWhen you search 'google'... you'll see... lol
- rkagerer 1y agoSome entertaining misreads: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Sex https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Sex
- domo__knows 1y agoPERU ANA
- rocauc 1y agoReminds me of NY Cerebro, semantic search across New York City's hundreds of public street cameras: https://nycerebro.vercel.app/ https://nycerebro.vercel.app/ (e.g. search for "scaffolding")
- silverpiranha 1y agoAh yeah, this was the winning project at an NVIDIA and Vercel hackathon awhile back
- harikb 1y agoWhat is surprising to me is how low res the public street camera are. Combine that with the glare of car headlights ... :(
- NtG_UK 1y agoFinally, this guy’s OCR-friendly long game pays off! https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=BNE https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=BNE
- vincnetas 1y agowhat's BNE?
- k1t 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNE_(artist) 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 1y agoI like it. I am hoping there is a similar one for Austin, TX
- djha-skin 1y agoThe 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 1y agoUnder 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 1y agoMy explorations "obey", "injured?", "fuck trump", "fuck obama"
- komali2 1y agoI 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 1y ago“Andrew Yang” “Mamdani” “Eric Adams”
- komali2 1y agoMamdani 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 1y ago“Sex” -> https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/-FQLvskTncufoBXtcfi0aA?o=661232 https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/-FQLvskTncufoBXtcfi0aA?o=66...
- 4782294782 1y agoHope he gets to enjoy the freedom of soccer balls hitting the wall outside his flat 16/7.
- fifilura 1y agoFirst search for SAMO! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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=119551811 https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/DZz7Gp1PtROe78ailUpvlA?o=11...
- jdee 1y agoThe first search I did was IRAK, the second, FAILE. Ghosts of graf.
- ragazzina 1y agoThe 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 1y agoI’d love to see a mash up of this and the historical street view archive from the city archives.
- deanc 1y agoThis 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 1y agoSeems 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 1y agoYeah, 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 1y agoIt could be. If they didn't think about it, now they can. Could easily seeing myself come back to this. │ └── Dey well; Be well
- mudaib 1y ago[dead]
- moritzwarhier 1y agoI could spend hours sending nonsensical queries to this site (but probably shouldn't). Enviable idea. https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=this+is+not https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=this+is+not
- henkytanky 1y agoI 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 1y agothis is why i love HN.. dang it even found my childhood bagels store in Queens! https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=bagels+jackson+heights https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=bagels+jackson+heights <heart>
- pxeger1 1y agoThis must be great for OSINT. I wonder if intelligence agencies already have something like this for the whole world.
- artur_makly 1y ago37,975 bagels in nyc! *w/ some dupes https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=bagels https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=bagels
- r24y 1y agoSearching "Fool" gives a lot of OCR errors, some of which are due to occlusions: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=fool&p=3 https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=fool&p=3 "Surgery of the Fool" is my personal favorite.
- dc10tonite 1y agoSame with "fart," and it's an absolute delight: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=fart 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 1y agoFound 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=31009710 https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/SSQGgn90zcClm6MdOlDOsA?o=31...
- amadeuspagel 1y agoAll the dotcoms in NYC: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=.com&sm=e https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=.com&sm=e
- zniturah 1y agoReporting a bug : 4123262 matches for Google.
- ivanjermakov 1y agoThis would tremendously help in making of a "Lavish" music video: https://youtu.be/flYgpeWsC2E https://youtu.be/flYgpeWsC2E
- IIAOPSW 1y agoSurprisingly 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 1y agoIs there an API? I'd love to make a music video like the one in https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/ https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/
- ge96 1y agoTangent, 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 https://youtu.be/ohlzQNCpT7M?si=zH764fDlHqPKyjin&t=537 ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZi2GeEGdvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZi2GeEGdvM
- at-fates-hands 1y agoThere 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 1y agoYou 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 1y agoDo you think those videos of tech markets in Tokyo are still online? I would enjoy seeing them.
- at-fates-hands 1y agoI did a quick check because I had saved it and appears the account is no longer active.
- stevenking86 1y agoEasy to find a favorite graffiti artist of mine this way: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Hektad https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Hektad
- anonu 1y agoAwesome 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 1y agoSurprisingly, 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=-73.9423&m_zm=11 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?
- telcal 1y agoThe first text I thought to search was "as old as hills". https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=as+old+as+hills https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=as+old+as+hills As seen on the sign of a liquor store near where I used to live. More info revealed https://lostnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-mystery-of-jade-fountain-liquor.html https://lostnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-mystery-of-...
- da-x 1y agoI'm not sure it's working well. https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=linux https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=linux
- lIl-IIIl 1y agoOCR mistakes can be hilarious. This was read as "STAR FUCKS COFFEE": https://www.google.com/maps/@40.785843,-73.95097,3a,20y,56.60h,95.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4jhjN8xjAWIDED1jHcYQ5g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@40.785843,-73.95097,3a,20y,56.6...
- rehanahmed 1y agoI searched for "Google" expecting no results and I ended up with a heatmap of every streetview pic ever. https://www.alltext.nyc/map?q=google&sm=e&m_lat=40.7532&m_lon=-73.9509&m_pt=16&m_bn=6 https://www.alltext.nyc/map?q=google&sm=e&m_lat=40.7532&m_lo...
- dioxis 1y agoThe N word yielded interesting results.
- don_searchcraft 1y agoThere are definitely some mistakes with the OCR, seeing quite a few instances of OPEN being mistranslated as OBEY
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]