A Street View image from Google Maps shows a dirt road with some trees on the sides. The sky barely shows any clouds and there are a couple of streetlights. This elements they could be from anywhere, from Oklahoma, in the USA, to Almería, in Spain. “This is going to be…Hot Springs, Australia,” Trevor Rainbolt says, clicking a location on a world map. You’re right. The point he has chosen is only 10 kilometers from the place in the photo.
Come back again: this time the photo shows a small town in the mountains. Some roofs of houses are distinguished. “Hmmm, this has to be North Iceland.” Bingo. Once again he has succeeded. Although more precisely it was the northeast and his chosen area was about 40 kilometers from the place in the photo. For any of us, another impressive win. For him, a major failure.
Who is this guy, and why does he know Google Maps by heart? He is Trevor Rainbolt and he has a special talent.
His ability allows him to look at any image on Google Maps and pinpoint where it was taken. with amazing speed and precision. He does it just by looking at the photo for 0.1 seconds and can do it five or six times in a row. Even if the photo is black and white or pixelated, it succeeds. Sometimes you can even name a country blindfolded, simply by having someone else describe it to you.
At 23 years old and with more than 1.2 million followers on TikTok, Rainbolt has become an icon in the community of geography enthusiasts who play a game called GeoGuessr. It’s very simple: on their computer or mobile, players look at any image on Google Maps (in Street View mode) and must guess, as fast as they can, exactly where it is. The closer they get, the more points they get.
But… How does he do it?
Rainbolt is one of the best GeoGuessr players in the world. And, although for some his findings seem like magic, for him they are simply the result of hundreds of hours of practice and a brutal hunger for geographical knowledge. He himself explains in this Vice article that it was horrible at first and that it all came down to a combination of repetition and pattern recognition. “I think anyone can do it,” he noted.
As indicated in some videos, the trick is not so much to memorize every inch of the planet, but to pay attention to the small differences between countries. When it plays, looks for example at the painted lines of a road (double yellow lines are common in the UK and Singapore) and any words with different letters (such as Ü, common in Hungary). It also tries to differentiate license plates (New York, New Jersey and Alaska have yellow plates). “The poles that are black and orange at the bottom are very Thai,” she explained.
However, after thousands of games, Rainbolt began to use instinct. “When you play that much, you get such an insight into what certain regions of the world look like that you develop a sixth sense“, he said. He began to realize that he saw a particular shade of grass in South Africa or soil in Nigeria, although he could not describe them. Although he confesses that he still has a lot to improve. He has a hard time differentiating the areas of urban Europe. “I am much better in rural Europe,” he laughed. “And Russia is my downfall,” he added.
The GeoGuessr community: compete to recognize places
Although his skill is incredible, he is by no means the best GeoGuessr player in the world. That honor is said to go to a Dutchman who calls himself GeoStique, or a Frenchman known as Blinky. While Rainbolt can quickly recognize the country of Montenegro, the best players even know the city and region. “They have all the roads in North Macedonia memorized. Now they are learning the roads of Russia,” explained Rainbolt.
The GeoGuessr platform was created in 2013 by Swedish software engineer Anton Wallén. Soon some youtubers like the British GeoWizard helped to promote it. It also became popular during the pandemic, when they introduced Battle Royale multiplayer mode. And of course, Rainbolt’s TikTok posts pushed him further.
now the site has 40 million accounts and the company has 25 employees in Stockholm. How do they make money? To play unlimited, subscribers contribute 2 euros per month. And this revenue goes to pay developers and Google, which charges them for the use of its software.
Best players they are usually around 15 years old and already competing for world records. The tournaments are streamed on Twitch, and while the prizes aren’t much, they do so for earning the respect of thousands of GeoGuessr players and their rivals, who meet almost daily to trade tips on Discord channels.
Ironically, despite all the time they spend learning the world, some players like Rainbolt have never even traveled outside of their country and their knowledge of geography is limited only to what is available on Google Maps. It’s just surreal.
Images: Trevor Rainbolt