A year after his death, I discovered Google Streetview had captured an image of my grandfather walking his dog. His face was blurred, but it was right outside his house and I recognized his dog. I took a screenshot and shared it it with my family on Facebook.

42 comments

  1. Street view captured my grandmother pulling my nephew in his wagon around the driveway. They both loved doing that.

  2. I get all my fishing spots off of google earth if that counts as interesting lol

  3. That’s really sweet.

    Google Earth has a prominent image of my bfs mom’s ass straight up in the air as she’s bending completely over picking berries in the front yard lol.

    Edit: slightly more wholesome, Google Earth has old pictures of my beach house. It was an adorable house my parents did a lot of work on. They sold it in 2007 and then it got devastated by hurricane Sandy; it needed to be torn down. I have great memories in that house and it’s nice to move down the street and see it there again.

  4. It’s probably only interesting to me but, when I looked at the trailer park I grew up in, it’s so much smaller than it seemed when I was a little kid. I remember it being huge, with twists and turns, and it was so easy to get lost. But it’s barely three acres of space, and it’s basically built around one road loop with a few smaller loops and cul-de-sacs.

  5. I put a garden gnome on the stoop of a building I used to live in and they blurred it out. Guess gnomes need privacy too.

  6. Friend of mine grew up in a town that’s notorious for having a lot of celebrity residents living in it (Alpine NJ). It’s a gated community and most properties have huge fences that offer little glimpses into them.

    We got a kick out of it looking at them through Google Maps.

  7. It’s a thing now when see a Google Maps truck pass you do weird things like pretend to strangle your friend. Some people find out when the truck is going to pass their house and set up very elaborate scenes.

    Anyway my friend says his mom’s always doing laundry so every Google satellite shot shows laundry hanging out the back yard lol.

  8. Found a street view image of my uncle walking around to the back of his house. The street view of his street has since updated, and now it’s gone. I’ve seen people say you can see older images, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how.

  9. When I was considering moving to Pittsburgh I was looking at streetview to “walk” around, and in one spot downtown there was a furry walking down the street. Full (very expensive looking) fursuit and all.

  10. Yes! In my 20’s I lived in a shared house with friends who I love very much. Google street view has them sitting on the stoop smoking and it warms my heart!

  12. I discovered a 23-acre key off the coast of Southwest Florida that someone purchased and built a house on.

    The entrance to the property is in a regular neighborhood on a standard lot, but is gated and decorated with ornate and manicured landscaping.

    It was very interesting because it’s a very unique piece of property in an otherwise unassuming and unspectacular, nearly empty neighborhood.

    Entrance onto property from street:

    https://maps.app.goo.gl/JMYmsUUgxForqLjLA?g_st=ic

    Actual home all the way out on the key:

    https://maps.app.goo.gl/7bVbUcPSVNemWSpY6?g_st=ic

  14. My buddy’s house still has my car from highschool parked in the driveway.

  15. The primary runway at Area 51 is 7,200 meters (23,600 ft in freedom units) making it the worlds longest paved runway. For perspective, the longest paved runway outside of this is only 5,000 meters long.

  16. There is a wall of tanks in the mountains outside my hometown. Sadly its on government property so you cannot go and look at them.

    34.99628672635074, -106.41942140941212

  17. The feature where you can see the street view images from previous years is pretty cool. There’s a relatively new subdivision near me. If I look at the street view from 2007, that neighborhood wasn’t there, and the road it’s on was still dirt. Being able to see what an area looked like 16 years ago is quite interesting.

  18. For years google maps showed a land border between Michigan and Minnesota on a spit of land at the mouth of the Pigeon River near Canada. It’s not there now but I suspect that when they fed the text of the boundary agreements into the system it discovered that quirk. Then somebody manually erased it.

  20. There’s a lone F-14 in the boneyard in Tucson behind the row of B-1 bombers, and four more over by the F-15’s. And what appears to be five more with no wings next to those. 34°59’46.6″N 106°25’09.9″W

    EDIT: And one more up on the row where they used to enter the base for the tours. 32.171095, -110.850974

  21. On street view I noticed my neighbor who barely ever even goes outside was walking down the street. He’s only in a few frames, and sort of blurry in a few. But he’s definitely there.

  22. It’s pretty cool seeing my front yard garden evolve over the years via street view snapshots.

  23. A friend of mine had to spread her moms ashes in some tiny town in West Virginia. She doesn’t have a car or license, so I was using maps and stuff to plot her route getting there. In this process, I figured out what a “hollar” was. I had heard it referenced before but never had any clear idea of what it was exactly other than a place peoples family comes from. If you look with the satellite layer turned on you can see long row after row of small “micro mountians” in that they look like a mountian range with peaks and ridgelines but they are very obviously smaller. So when someone says they come from the next hollar over, they literally mean the next valley. I can dig up the name of the nearest small town I was looking at if someone needs an example of where to look.

  24. When I read your post I was going to recommend r/geography because people post all sorts of interesting geographic formations they find.

    More to your question, my work mate from the Philippines street-view walked me through her town, showed me her old home, where she worked/hung out. It was really neat and I remember thinking how unthinkable that would’ve been not that long ago.

  25. It’s wild to look at central Nevada, all the craters and random installations with tiny dirt roads that go everywhere.

  27. At parent’s house it still has my high school car parked on the street that has stickers from our high school sports on it

  28. My friend is on Google Street View too. He was working on his car in the driveway. He said he can remember the exact day and time it passed by because there were also people working on his law that day.

    As far as other stuff: just to east Bastrop TX there’s a giant forest of trees that shape the name “LUECKE”.

    Man I’ve seen other stuff too and can’t think of them right now.

  29. I went to find my old house in West Philly, and there was a guy riding a fixed gear bike flipping off the camera right in front.

  30. I noticed a strange circular “mountain range” smack in the middle of the California Central Valley known as the [Sutter Buttes](https://maps.app.goo.gl/8J4FYV2JZhdnhvuNA?g_st=ic).

    Another one, which I first noticed as an oddly out of place patch of color in an temperature map of Italy, is (drained) [Fucine Lake](https://maps.app.goo.gl/PsywCkKGSSoSTtFJA?g_st=ic). It is a natural bowl in the mountains with no outlet, so the level would change a lot until they drained it in the 1800s. Even the ancient Romans tackled it with their water management know-how.

    Huh, didn’t realize my two top-of-mind examples mirror each other. Bumpy bit in a flat spot, flat spot in a bumby bit.

  36. My dad died in 2006. His blurred out face is still on Google Maps.

  37. I found the gunnery range the US Army trains attack helicopter pilots at on Ft. Sill. There’s a A7(or F8) few A4 Skyraiders, some AVA-8 Harriers, a huey helicopter, artillery and some Bradley APCs that look chewed up.

    And if you go south a little bit there’s a building complex with a F-111, another A7 / F8, a T-33 and a T-37

    [https://www.google.com/maps/place/25%C2%B032’09.4%22N+80%C2%B010’13.9%22W/@34.6567128,-98.703182,1335m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d25.535949!4d-80.17052?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/place/25%C2%B032'09.4%22N+80%C2%B010'13.9%22W/@34.6567128,-98.703182,1335m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d25.535949!4d-80.17052?entry=ttu)

  38. Not Google Earth, but when playing Geoguessr. I hadn’t gotten the pro version yet, so had to do the maps as fast as possible. There was this one map that wouldn’t open, and was just dark. I decided that instead of restarting the page I’d just guess and not care about the result.

    Where they had placed me was on the road between my childhood home and my grandmama’s house. I’ve gone over that road at least a thousand times in my life, but because of some absolute BS I wasn’t able to get it, and I’m still furious about it to this day.

  39. One of my cousins is a big “the government is tracking us” “deep state” conspiracy theorists. He was mowing his lawn when the street view car drove by. It was the chief form of entertainment at the next Thanksgiving.

  40. I discovered that if you time-travelled ~15 years to the present in my city, it would be completely unrecognizable. It’s basically a new city, and the old one that recently got replaced on google earth looks like a 15th century England with Jack the Ripper waiting around any given corner

  41. I’m waiting for the day it catches one of my cats in the window. I should check now for an update.

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