Search London StreetView panoramas by text
Details
- External ID
- 45995913
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Search London StreetView panoramas by text
- Website domain
- publicinsights.uk
- Launched
- Nov. 20, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 39
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7936681222707423
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Inspired by All Text in NYC (https://alltext.nyc) by Yufeng Zhang I thought I would replicate something similar for London.A searchable tool that lets you explore text captured across Google Street View imagery in London; shop signs, posters, graffiti, van numbers etc
Enrichment
- Theme
- typography and unicode text tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Search & retrieval
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- text search for street view panoramas
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the front-end map and text search interface is straightforward, ingesting and running OCR at scale over millions of London Google Street View panoramas requires significant data pipeline orchestration and compute costs.
What it would actually take: Building this requires a crawler using the Google Street View Static API or scraping SV tiles across a dense London coordinate grid, followed by an OCR processing pipeline (e.g. PaddleOCR or cloud vision APIs). The extracted text with bounding boxes and geographic coordinates is then indexed into a geospatial search database like PostgreSQL with PostGIS or Elasticsearch, connected to a Mapbox/Leaflet web UI.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Google Street View (direct alternative), Search all text in New York City, All text in Brooklyn
Concerns raised: Google throttles scrapers / rate limiting issues, Incomplete search results (missing some businesses like R Soles, Batman statue), Only matches text queries to actual text, not visual content, Phrase search doesn't work as expected (searches individual words instead), Paywall blocks access to more results ($29/month subscription required)
Feature requests: Object detection in next run (rubbish bins, street furniture), Match text queries to visual content, not just OCR text, Global version beyond London, Support for historic panoramas, Higher resolution coverage (5m spacing instead of 50m)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 60 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #10 of 61 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
- I Was Here · hn · 2026-03-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- I Was Here · hn · 2026-03-10 · 67 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- NYC MapTap · hn · 2026-09-08 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- A website for exploring historical photographs of my city · hn · 2026-08-12 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- bikemap.nyc · hn · 2026-01-07 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Text Scanner: Image to Text · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- An interactive, interlinked city exploration project (St. Louis) · hn · 2026-07-06 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- placebound.app · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.