A beginner's guide to guessing locations in Street View

If you've never played a geography guessing game, being dropped into a random street somewhere on Earth can feel impossible. It isn't. You don't need to memorise the world; you just need to know which handful of clues to look for. This guide gets you from "no idea" to "confident guess" with the five basics.

1. Which side of the road?

This is the easiest and most powerful first move. Look at parked cars, oncoming traffic, or which lane the Street View car is in. Left-hand traffic points to a smaller set of countries, the UK, India, Japan, Australia, South Africa and a few dozen others, while right-hand traffic covers most of the Americas, Europe, and Asia. One glance cuts the world roughly in half.

2. What language is on the signs?

You don't need to read it, you just need to recognise the script. Latin letters, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese characters, Thai, and the Indian scripts each belong to a limited region. If you spot an unfamiliar alphabet, that alone often tells you the continent.

3. What does the environment look like?

Is it lush and tropical, dry and dusty, snowy, or temperate and green? Climate narrows your options fast. Palm trees and humidity suggest the tropics; endless pine forest suggests the far north; red desert soil suggests Australia or parts of Africa and the American Southwest.

4. How developed is the infrastructure?

Wide, well-marked motorways with modern crash barriers look different from narrow roads with open drainage ditches. The style of houses, the density of power lines, and the quality of the road surface all hint at which part of the world, and which economy, you're standing in.

5. Commit to a guess

Beginners often freeze and run out of time. Don't. Because scoring rewards how close you are, a rough guess in the right region beats a perfect guess you never placed. Make your best call, drop the pin, and learn from the reveal. You'll improve every single round.

That's genuinely all you need to start. Once these five become second nature, our country-identification and Street View meta guides will take you from confident beginner to genuinely hard to beat.