A last look at the German past
I watch Wolf Owl play GeoGuessr. GeoGuessr is a game about guessing as accurately as possible where in the world the depicted place is based on Google Street View images. You can read more about it, for example, in this text by Wolfseule, and if you want to know a lot more about it afterwards, you can also read this one, which deals with the question that is quite central to the game, why half the Internet wants to go to bed with GeoRainbolt.
Because I hope to be able to score with my knowledge of cobblestones, we play several times on a map of Germany. Germany was only covered very rudimentarily by Google Street View between 2008 and 2010, which makes guessing easier but also more boring. In this video you can see the almost non-existent coverage of Germany compared to neighboring countries.
In our game rounds almost all the pictures come from Hamburg, two from Cologne, one from Berlin and one from Dresden. “Such old pictures!” says Wolf Owl several times. “Do you recognize that from the old cars by now?” I ask. But she recognizes it from the image quality, which is worse than that from countries where the Google car has been driving not so long ago.
The next day it turns out that this was the last opportunity to see Germany in this form on Google Street View. That very night the footage was replaced with new footage recorded in 2020-2022. The new pictures even have GeoRainbolt on them (in the green sweater).
(Kathrin Passig)