Comment by dajonker

This is a hobby of mine, too. It's one of the most fantastic things available on the internet. The ability to travel anywhere in the world and - as the author of the blog also said - the ability to travel back in time as well!

I did some road trips in 2009 and made pictures with a compact camera. I was able to determine the almost exact locations I shot these pictures thanks to street view, so I could see route that we took back then. One picture was shot in the dark but had a distinctive logo sign on the side of the road. Given the timestamp on the photo and the extremely blurry restaurant and motel logos on the sign, I had a good idea of where to look, but it turned out this sign was only up in a single year and it was quite hard to navigate to!

Unfortunately, I don't think you can "lock" the street view date? Nor does the map view on go back in time? I guess you can use Google Earth to view satellite images. There is a whole neighborhood in Seoul that's been completely leveled on the satellite pictures, yet you can still use street view from 2018 to travel around.