Taiwan.

Nigeria.

Welcome to the world of geo guessing.

New Zealand. Iceland.

Maybe Ghana, here's my best guess.

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.

Wired talked to GeoGuessr, Trevor Rainbolt.

If you look at this possum guard, those are distinctive Tasmania in Australia.

There's an easter road in North Macedonia where there's dead flies on the camera.

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.

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 paint 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 using 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 like a calculated guess and every single guess.

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 side of the road countries drive on is extremely important.

There's a couple of 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,

'cause all these different things together are very helpful and 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 ballerd, you know you're gonna be in that country.

There's a website called geohints.com too that has all the ballerds listed out. It'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 a 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 like 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 going to be the UK or sometimes France.

Even the length of a license plate is a clue.

Mexico has short, colorful plates where Ecuador has short and long plates and then there's brazil that only has long plates.

Some spots are easily recognizable because of unique characteristics.

Sometimes it's the shape of the sign.

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 in the north.

And sometimes it's really just knowing about the Google Map car.

North Kyrgyzstan and south Kyrgyzstan are covered by different people, to where one in the south was shorter.

So the reflection of the camera on rear mirror is at a different angle, so you would learn what percentage of the road you can see on the mirror,

so you can tell you're in south Kyrgyzstan versus north.

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, 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.

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 roads 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 one of the easiest pinpointed countries because there's just road numbers and towns everywhere.

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 ballerd than most usual ballerds.

and those are only really found in Scotland and France.

But with driving right there, we would have to be in France.

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 look 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 as 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.