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Comment by aflag | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I don't think I'd mind not having the street view feature. The only reason I use it is to see how foreign countries look like. What are people using it for?

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Used Google Street View and 3D when looking to buy a house. It’s 10x more telling than the actual ad. You can see the slope, street size, the freespace on the sides, neighborhood debsity, the actual land size, the roof constitution. Ad photos tell you how it was renovated inside, which tells you nothing that you need to know.

It did fee like invading people in their garden, especially the satellite/3D view. But so do the photos: if you are politically exposed or a Youtuber, it’s annoying to know people can use the ad photos to disqualify you on poverty topics.

When I house hunted pre-Street View (and even pre decent photos being available in many cases), I spent so many hours driving to take a look at listings which were a big nope as soon as I got there if not before. I don't use Street View routinely but that is a case where it would have been extremely useful.

It really is amazing how well real estate photographers do in making a dump look attractive. And I'm not just talking about saturation or other photo editing (though that helps, too), but in just choosing the framing and the time of day to take the photo.

Using Street View probably whittled my list down by half, and saved a lot of wasted showings.

I'll normally use street view to familiarize myself with an area when I'm heading there for the first time, especially for something like a vacation. It can be useful to see where your hotel (or a potential hotel) might be located, get a look at the approach and the area around it, visualize how far a walk it is to the nearest bus stop or grocery store, etc.

That way when you get there, you already have a little muscle memory that helps you know where to turn, which direction to head out of the hotel, etc.

For me, this is most especially useful when traveling, e.g., figure out the kind of neighborhood an airbnb is in an unfamiliar city, or to map out that walk from the central train station to a off-the-main-drag apartment or hotel.

When I was buying my house, I used it to check out a neighborhood as a first-cut filter, prior to spending the time & gas to go drive around in person.

If I'm driving somewhere new, I'll use it to identify landmarks for turns. While I'll often have the spoken map directions going on my phone, if the intersection is complex, streetview can help me get into the correct turn lane.

I wanted to use it for Germany prior to a trip a couple of years ago, but it looks like very little of the country has coverage, which is annoying. But it's their country and if they don't want camera cars photographing everything I can understand that.[0]

[0] I had a neighbor get divorced because of streetview. Back when it was new, the first thing everyone did was look up their home. Well, my neighbor saw a custom motorcycle parked out front that was not his.

I don't think it's privacy concerns that lead to Germany not being covered very well, Google just didn't see the benefit of going far beyond the large cities. I live in the suburbs and our sleepy little town has no streetview-coverage at all.

I wonder whether you can use the percentage of blurred houses as a signal for evaluating a neighborhood.

It was for privacy reasons, which is why so many houses are also blurred. Once a house is blurred there's no way to unblur it since Google doesn't take new pictures and as far as I know the blur would still stay at that spot.

Look at every country around Germany and you'll see a web of streets covered by Street View. In Germany it's one big blank [0] and what's covered uses decade old pictures taken before Google stopped mapping Germany on Street View.

[0] https://imgur.com/09Glxyo

I saw a Street View car driving around in Berlin very recently, maybe they have started again?

When you look at that map, you'll see the main cities being covered, but only them. Even rural Romania is mostly covered, while Germany is almost as blank as Bosnia.

Berlin at least still doesn't appear to have any significant added coverage over the past decade. Yes, there are pictures uploaded by users. But the Street View picture seem to be old. In Germany looking at taxis is a good way of telling the age of a picture. All the Street View pictures I clicked on have pre-2010 models. I'd thank they would update the touristic areas or city center first but they seem just as old.

I'd imagine that the privacy backlash is the reason they didn't see the benefit of rolling it out more widely. In most other countries with Street View coverage there's plenty of rural areas covered well. In the UK basically everywhere is included.

The neighbor got divorced because they discovered their spouse’s infidelity. The unusual method of discovery is incidental.

You say that today. Back then it was the great unknown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A

What do you mean by "it"? If you're saying the Internet was the great unknown, that doesn't seem to disagree with extra88 at all. The method of discovery -- the Internet = the great unknown -- is incidental to the fact that infidelity was going on .

I wonder the extent to which doorbell cameras have led to infidelity discoveries. I’m sure people sneak around back and all that, but maybe parked cars show up, or a suspicious spouse asks a neighbor across the street to see their camera footage from a particular day/time.

I used Street View to remember the name of this family restaurant in Munich I visited on vacation, where I met the owner - a really nice old German guy. I had a great time there, but the name of the restaurant is in German and I just can't commit it to long-term memory.

I knew I took a right, and another right from the hotel and remember the style of the buildings nearby. I have the hotel reservation email, so I look up the restaurant every few years, just to reminisce.

Last time I did that, there was a different restaurant in its place. I'd like to stay positive and think the old guy sold the restaurant and retired somewhere nice with his wife.

I worked in Kenya in 2000 for few years, & we used to go to a hotel in posh area of Nairobi for weekend getaways, on some weekends, for pool, food & relaxing. In 2015 I tried to look up Maps and Street View to see the hotel. All I remembered was that it was in a corner of a small roundabout, it had a pool in half arch & square joined, had a grass field & the entrances from street. Did not remember the street name, just the neighborhood name.

I remember myself sweeping the Maps Satellite to find the pool, field in 2015 & many times after that, but no luck.

Just yesterday I scanned the whole neighborhood, about 10kmx5km for pool torquoise spots in Satellite view, found my pool in 5 minutes, & then spent next 20 minutes walking around virtually in Street View as well as internal panoroma shots, was amazing to revisit while on being the poo seat. Also looked at various roads approaching to it, where we used to drive.

Of course I starred the place in my list for future.

It’s super useful to check parking spots, street sizes, shops a multi-story building, train station entries/exits, how a restaurant looks from the outside and not just from the handpicked pics on the homeoage.

Streetview has a ton of info that Google Maps will never get quite right.

I used it one bleak winter to get a picture of the path onto a beach I visit with family every year. It was a scene I never thought to photograph, but it triggered the happy memories of smells, sounds, and the sandy wood planks under my feet.

For work, we use it a lot to locate and assign accurate coordinates to health care facilities. Looking for signs with names or address numbers. We also use geocoding software, but that often approximates a location based on the range of numbers on a block. For example, the address 150 Main St might be placed in the middle of the 100s block. Works for cities and suburbs with regularly spaced buildings, but awful for rural roads where a "block" can stretch a mile.

For me, it is THE differentiating feature that keeps me using Google maps, rather than a competing service. I take an annual 7 day motorcycle trip though the southwest US, and street view allows me to see a road from ground level which is far more useful that satellite view to determine the road contours, and whether it would be a nice ride. Admittedly, in all the places I ride, street view hasn't been updated since 2008, so its no longer useful to identify business, but its still quite useful.

I use it every time I am going somewhere new. Where is there parking? Am I turning left or right to get there? Is there a protected left turn? How busy does the street look... is there street parking, or a parking lot?

Maybe this isn't as important outside big cities, but I like to have a plan of what I am going to do before I get somewhere. Otherwise, I might end up on the wrong side of the street without the ability to turn left, or I will be stuck in the wrong lane without a chance to crossover traffic by the time I see the turn in spot. In the city I am in, this means circling around and probably adding 15-20 minutes to the arrival time.

I use it to have a visual anchor of what the place looks like. While driving sometimes its not appropriate to slow down and read the building number, but a big visual like building color or shape will help. Especially if I want to enter the building where missing it means missing the destination.

Another use case of mine, is when I have to go through an intersection of streets or freeways with a lot of merging and diverging routes, I use street view to know which lanes do I have to be on to not miss my exits, or what signs would I read if I am on the correct route.

So in summary, large visual hints.

I extensively use it to scout when driving into unknown places esp. small towns. It gives more driver point of view of things compared to map view.

I use it in VR a lot to revisit the places that I've traveled to or lived at, often many years after the fact.

It's also particularly nice for planning trips (I spent a significant amount of time "walking" my neighborhoods in Croatia and Montenegro before moving to each, and a good amount of time in Japan to plan out a ton of nice walks/views before spending time there.

I've also had a lot of fun (in VR and regular street view) "walking" through places mentioned in old parents/grandparents notebooks/diaries, where they lived/worked, etc.

Not quite sure of the location of a business you're thinking of visiting, or even if they're still in business? Find their store on streetview.

Need to know the parking restrictions on that road, or the turning restrictions, or entry restrictions? Look at the signs on streetview.

Want to check the buildings you'll be turning at in advance, so you can make a short journey without looking at your phone? Streetview.

Want to know whether that street looks good to bicycle on? Streetview again...

Street view is really helpful for any kind of local contract work. Like landscaping, home remodeling, holiday lighting, satellite TV installation, etc. Companies and individuals that do that kind of work use street view extensively.

Well, you want to look through the itinerary to not get lost in an unknown city when finding a building where you're going to have a work meeting.

When I plan my travel and am looking for ho(s)tels I very often check neighborhood for "shadiness" using Street View.

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