Search London StreetView panoramas by text
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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
HN · launched Nov 20, 2025 · 39 upvotes (top 21%) · 0 views
Niche: multimedia and records search engines · 74 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Search & retrieval
- B2C
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 74 launches in multimedia and records search engines →
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 : 112 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #22 of 113 (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 0.47
- I Was Here · hn · 2026-03-10 · 67 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- City Pixels by Side Eye Tom · ph · 2026-10-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- A giant pixel map of London · hn · 2026-10-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- The Sign Book — by London Street Signs · ph · 2026-11-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Image to Text · ph · 2026-10-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- London Tourist Map · ph · 2026-10-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- NYC MapTap · hn · 2026-09-08 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.39
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