There are so many clues as to where you are and a far more limited area of coverage than you might think. It’s not uncommon to recognize a road or neighborhood from a previous game.

The ‘meta’ includes everything from the tape on the camera mount bars, the reflective patterns on bollards, to the quality of the image encoding.

That, plus a subconscious ‘feel’ you start to develop goes a very very long way in a relatively short amount of time. I sometimes feel like I could tell I was in Singapore or not even if I was only allowed to look at my feet.

I got very good at it, but I lost my appetite for the game when Ukraine was invaded. Before that, I’d be joking about stuff like how the wooden window frames in Russia were much fancier and that’s how you could tell them apart.

While yes, there’s the Geoguessr meta, Tom also does a thing where viewers send him a photo and he has to guess where they are and he usually manages which is pretty amazing.

I’ve played some free games on GeoGuessr and this is exactly it. After a while you just start to recognize things like the same Google car on the same wide desert highway, hello Dubai. Even the exact same spots come up often.

Then again, some places are so far off into the bush that it takes some routine just to figure out which continent you’re on.

Something to keep in mind is that they aren't playing random points on the map, they're playing fixed maps with say 20,000 locations in them. They play them to the point that they recognize many of them. Like magic, but a little less than if it really was just a random point on the globe they could recognize instantaneously.

>Something to keep in mind is that they aren't playing random points on the map, they're playing fixed maps with say 20,000 locations in them. They play them to the point that they recognize many of them.

This is only partly true. It's true of ADW, the most popular community map, though it has over 50k locations. But the top players have played this map so much that some people do have some locations memorized (which is insane). Then there are a few countries or territories where the Street View coverage is so limited that you can basically memorize it, like Madagascar and Greenland.

There are enough locations & maps out there that the game isn't really about memorizing exact locations, though. But if you play a lot you do get good at "vibes" which is essentially pattern matching against other times you've played.

This used to be a problem but nowadays there are algorithmically (“AI”) generated maps with so many points that repeats are rare. A new map with 50000 locations can be generated in an afternoon.

Yeah, it was actually kind of disappointing to understand that after buying the subscription. I mean, Google Maps coverage is far from being complete as it is (and obviously is not going to be in the observable future even for places where it technically could be, like most of the China), and if you are playing the game to learn something, being just more playable in duels is not what you want. New places appear from time to time, so I'm not completely sure if they do that on purpose to make game easier, or there are some real reasons to do so. And if it's ever going to be better.

I dono, that was pretty obvious but I didn't know how he could tell the difference between France and Belgium... He has videos listing off all the clues though... Apparently Belgium's telephone poles don't have blue things that French ones do.

Try clicking on a few countries in

https://geotips.net/europe/

This is the kind of stuff that Geoguessr players call "meta" (or "metas").

I personally feel like it's more sporting to learn things like bollards, roadway markings, utility pole styles, and so on, which feel like they're about geography (observable differences in infrastructure or culture that persistently exist in different places), compared to things about Google Maps cars, imagery generations, glitches, redaction patterns, and so on, which feel more like they're about Google Maps itself (historical accidents of how and when the company mapped particular regions).

But if you play a lot or watch streamers talking about this stuff, there will be some kinds of metas that you can't unsee because they may just become obvious to you with time! I felt kind of bad about winning a Geoguessr duel earlier this week because I remembered a glitch meta that I had seen someone talking about on a stream... (you can see it instantly on Geotips if you click on Montenegro!).

Fully agreed, I tried to stick to the same meta. My rule of thumb was, if I was standing there what could I see? So domain and phone numbers on billboards are fine, camera quality isn't.

Though it is hard to avoid accidentally learning some meta like the Kenya or Ghana cars.