- That's France.
Taiwan.
Nigeria.
- [Narrator] Welcome to the world of geo guessing.
- New Zealand.
Is that Iceland.
Maybe Ghana here is my best guess.
- [Narrator] Where players guess where they are
on a Google Map,
based on one screenshot.
- Yeah, competitive Google Maps is the way I like to see it.
- [Narrator] Wired talked to GeoGuessr, Trevor Rainbolt.
- If you look at this possum guard,
those are distinct to Tasmania in Australia.
There is an eastern road in North Macedonia
where there's dead flies on the camera.
- [Narrator] To find out how he guesses countries
in 0.1 seconds.
- Oh my God.
Honestly, I dedicated any ounce of free time
in the past 13 months to Google Maps and learning countries.
So here we are.
- [Narrator] First, we had to see
is what Trevor doing legit?
So we put him to the test.
- Immediately we're gonna be in Latin America.
We have short plates, we have white on the bottom.
If I could see the crop here it would maybe be more helpful.
But I do think with the white painted pole bottoms
in Spanish, with short plates,
I would probably guess Guatemala
assuming you cut off the car.
I like to call these guesses vibe guesses
more than anything,
because it is just so intuition based.
So that's usually things like,
road line recognition, vegetation, how tropical it looks,
what the road is made out of, what concrete,
is it using asphalt?
How is the road quality?
Even picking up on things like
what Google coverage they're using.
Like what year was this country covered in?
So all these are going into a calculated guess
and every single guess.
- [Narrator] Now let's look at some tips and tricks
for GeoGuessr.
- The first thing I always tell people to learn
is telephone poles, bollards.
Learning what's at the road countries drive on
is extremely important.
There is a couple things that we're looking for
on utility poles to telephone poles.
You're looking at what it's made of, the design,
if there's stickers on it,
or different types of markings on the poles,
because all these different things together
are very helpful in going into an educated guess.
There's different types of poles,
there's ladder poles, there's holey poles,
there's a-frame poles, there's hook poles.
And then from there you have like,
okay, this is wooden, this is concrete.
95% of the poles that are concrete in Australia
are in Victoria.
So if I see a concrete pole, I know I'm gonna be Victoria.
If I see a black sticker, driving left,
with looking very tropical, it's gonna be mainland Malaysia.
Or a blue sticker is in France on their telephone poles.
And ladder poles are in Spain, Portugal, France.
It's very, very helpful to learn
these different types of poles,
and what different material each country uses
on their telephone poles
to help narrow down your guess.
Bollards are pretty much just road markings
in different countries.
Every country, for the most part, has a distinct bollard.
So pretty much if you see one bollard,
you know you're gonna be in that country.
There's a website called geohints.com too
that has all the bollards listed out,
that's extremely helpful.
Denmark has a yellow top,
or you can go into more region guessing
based off like Canada,
well, Alberta has black, white, black, white bollards.
Or Australia and Turkey have similar bollards
where it's like white with a red strip.
Or New Zealand has white with the red strip
but the red strip goes from end to end.
License plates are extremely helpful as well.
It's worth mentioning all license plates are blurred,
so you have to learn what blurred license plates look like.
A lot of times it's easier
when it's a very distinct color like yellow,
where if it's yellow front and back
it's gonna be Netherlands or Luxembourg.
If it's yellow, just back it's gonna be the UK,
or sometimes France.
- [Narrator] Even the length of a license plate is a clue.
- [Trevor] Mexico has short colorful plates,
where Ecuador has short and long plates.
And then there's Brazil that only has long plates.
- [Narrator] Some spots are easily recognizable
because of unique characteristics.
Sometimes it's the shape of the sign.
- [Trevor] The Hokkaido arrow sign,
where it's pointing at the road line.
It's only really found in
where it snows really heavily in Japan,
which is mainly the north.
- [Narrator] And sometimes it's really just knowing
about the Google Map car.
- North Kyrgyzstan and South Kyrgyzstan
were covered by different people,
to where one in the south was shorter,
so the reflection of the camera on the rear mirror
was at a different angle,
so you would learn what percentage of the road
you could see on the mirror,
so you could tell you're in South Kyrgyzstan versus North.
- [Narrator] And if you've seen Trevor's TikToks,
you know he's able to guess the location
by literally just the soil.
- Soil guessing really goes into every single guess.
But basically what you're looking at
is you're looking at the color of the soil
and overall the vegetation that's within the soil
and around it as well.
Is there more pebbles?
Is there more grass?
Is it more green?
And then overall, a lot of it really is,
I probably really couldn't describe it,
but some things just look like South Chile soil.
Okay, we're on one here,
we have light gray soil, very arid climate.
I'm gonna go to North Botswana here.
Slightly more east but was north Bots.
- [Narrator] And once you have all that information,
it's time to pinpoint.
- So when you're pinpointing, you're looking at things.
The first thing always when you're pinpointing
is to look down at the road
and see what direction the road is going.
So you can get the exact angle that the road is,
and then you can use that to reference
the road angle on the map.
So I need to find something that lines up with north,
with this angle, with a curve going west.
Obviously, using signage is super helpful.
If there's obviously a town name or a street name
or a highway number,
you're gonna use that to pinpoint the road from there.
Some countries are a lot easier
and have a lot easier numbering than others.
For example, Denmark is very easy to pinpoint,
because every road in Denmark is labeled everywhere.
It's like one of the easiest pinpoint world countries,
because there's just road numbers and towns everywhere.
- [Narrator] Now let's see how Trevor guesses
in 0.1 seconds.
- It's Sweden.
So Sweden here is a very easy guess to most pro players.
Mainly because really where you only get
those short white dashed key outer lines
is Estonia and Sweden,
but mainly very, very common in Sweden.
Norway has dashed outer lines as well,
but they're longer in length.
What was that, France?
Oh my God.
So the bollard we had in the bottom right there,
it's black and white,
but if it was colored, it would be white, red, white,
and it's like a lot bigger, round bollard
than most usual bollards,
and those are only really found in Scotland and France.
But with driving right there, we would have to be in France.
- [Narrator] Even with all these tips,
there are some places that are still
really, really challenging.
- Baltic roulette is the death of a lot of world records.
So the Baltics are so hard because they all like the same.
The most that I struggle with, are Indonesia and Russia
because they're humongous.
Fun fact, if you take Indonesia and stretch it
to actual size, it's actually bigger than the United States.
I don't think I've ever 5k a Russia lock
now that I remember it.
Or Indonesia, one day, one day.
I'm still getting things wrong.
I'm still getting regions wrong.
So there's more to learn.
Right now, I'm learning Australia
just cause I wanna be more precise at learning Australia.
And then eventually I'll probably go to Russia.
I would say after Russia is Turkey,
I really wanna get better Turkey.
That's the best part about this game
is as much is the best player in the world is at this game,
he has so much to learn.
Especially as Google updates coverage,
we get more countries.
Recently India got released,
which we've never had India coverage before.
So now we have to learn India.
I love nothing more than the GeoGuessr community.
We're all just a bunch of nerds
that sit in Discord and search through locations
and find different commonalities in countries
and play together and compete together.
There's probably 500 of us competing at a high level,
that's growing every day.
We've done this forever for years for just ourselves,
and so for it to finally have a platform
where other people are actually learning about us
and we have eyes on what we've spent so many hours,
just for an urge to learn about the world.