Originally published at: Teleport yourself to a random location (so long as the Google Street View camera's been there) | Boing Boing
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It was surprising to me the number of clicks I made before I saw something other than rural/pastoral.
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To me, it’s how similar places look around the globe. Is that Greece, Malaysia, or Mexico? Even our lands are more alike than we think.
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I set it to Ireland, and anytime a locale in Co. Kerry shows up, it’s an unnamed road… 
And now I’m list in a subdivision in Kilkenny! And on to Roscommon…
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Let’s see, my first few clicks have given me:
- Suburban Reykjavik
- Middle of fucking nowhere, western Australia.
- Middle of a forest, near Tampere, Finland.
- Desolate country road in Patagonia, near the Chilean border.
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Well most roads are unnamed.
Theres the national roads, usually one or two digits (e.g. N5, N17)
Then regional roads, usually three digits (e.g R350)
Then you get into local roads, usually 4 digits. (E.g L1200)
After that you are probably on a bóthrín which isn’t named, but may have an informal name (“the Tuam road”)
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This sounds like a variation on the game geoguessr, which was developed by a couple of guys a few years ago, which was based on google street view. You could play against yourself, or against other players. They developed it for fun, but then google got wind of it, they took it out of the developers’ hands, and what is left is a shell of its former self which uses bing, which has really poor visual resolution and is almost impossible to navigate in.
You’d pop in somewhere, and have to try and guess where you were, based on street signs, etc. I spent a lot of time in the rural U.S., Russia and Brazil, all of which have really extensive highway systems. But I did also see Iceland, Lake Como and the Atacama Desert.
Edited to add that there is google version, which you have to pay and register for, and a free version through Bing.
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I liked Geoguessr before it made you set up an account and a pay-to-play model. Its pretty sad to hear it is Bing-based now.
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I ended up on top of a small cliff above a beach outside Girvan in Ayrshire, with no roads in view.
That bit of Ayrshire was one of the places my mum grew up in. Not on top of the cliff, a few miles inland
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I seem to have come across a lot of those so far… Most of them have been from rural parts of the country, it seems to me.
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I think there’s some limitation in the interface. It doesn’t seem to pull in all street names.
Here is a stretch of a road that is named, but they call it “unnamed road” anyway.
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There’s the two versions now, at the least the last time I checked; the pay-to-play through google and the free one through Bing, which as I said, is terrible.
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Hm… I wonder why?
Probably can’t understand the accents 
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Which one?
It might be random, but the distribution isn’t what I’d expect. Out of 100 trials, I’ve landed to Slovenia, Latvia, and Swaziland more than a handful of times, very often Central Europe (maybe 30 times), almost never US (maybe twice) or Canada (never). Landed 3 times just west of Bogota.
Heh. When I tried it, my script-blocker addon caused it to jump randomly through a series of locations without stopping. When I let it work properly, it stopped on a spot in a Norway suburb that looks about the same as one in the US, the only immediate difference being how the powerlines to the houses are strung.
This is fun, ta for the link.
My first stop was the A33 in Botswana. If you think you’ve got it bad with potholes, well…
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Has anyone worked out the odds of landing randomly on your own street?
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