Comment by SamPatt
2 days ago
Spot on.
Nigeria and Tunisia have follow cars. Senegal, Montenegro and Albania have large rifts in the sky where the panorama stitching software did a poor job. Some parts of Russia had recent forest fires and are very smokey. One road in Turkey is in absurdly thick fog. The list is endless, which is why it's so fun!
Do you have a feel for how often StreetView published fresh imagery?
When that happens, is there a wild flurry of activity in the GeoGuessr community as players race to figure out the latest patterns?
Google updates Street View fairly frequently, but most of the updates are in developed nations and they're simply updating coverage with the same camera quality and don't change the meta.
However every once in a while you'll get huge updates - new countries getting coverage, or a country with older coverage getting new camera generation coverage, etc. And yes, the community watches for these updates and very quickly they try to figure out the implications. It's a huge deal when major coverage changes.
If you want an example of this, zi8gzag (one of the best known in the community) put out a video about a major Street View update not long ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLETln6ZatE
The community is very tuned into Google's street view plans - see Rainbolt's video talking to the Google street view team a few weeks back:
https://youtu.be/2T6pIJWKMcg?si=FUKuGkexnaCt7s_b
That zi8gzag video was fascinating, thanks for that.