Geoguessr is an online geography game. That may sound like the most boring thing you’ve ever hear but it’s actually very interesting if you’re a newbie in OSINT. A big part of OSINT is GEOSINT, that is, being able to look at a photo a understanding where it was taken using different techniques.

Geoguesser drops you into a Google street view session but without any of Google’s normal map aids such as links, bookmarks, etc and you have a time limit to find yourself on their map. If you can do it within a certain number of meters/feet, then you get more points.

For this walkthough, I’m going to start with a Classic Map set to World. I am setting the time limit to infinite so we can do this slowly.

 

Let’s Get started with the interface.#

This is an example of the screen that you will see.

  • On the top is the time that you have left. The free tier of Geoguessr let’s you play for 5 minutes every 15 minutes. An experienced player can usually finish a map in well under the time allotted.
  • In the upper-right had corner is current round. If you are playing to finish maps, then you can see which map you’re on.
  • In the bottom-right corner is the world map. It is here that you need to zoom in and place your pin where in the world you think you are.

Let’s do our first map!#

What do we see?

We see corn:

We see leafy trees, not just pines:

We see a nicely paved road that has no visible potholes and we see a yellow traffic sign with what looks to be a tractor. The condition of the road and the type of sign means that we are in the US or Canada.

Let’s turn around and zoom in a bit.

Here we can see a wood-framed house, this is more confirmation of being in North America. We see more farmland.

Notice the ivy hanging off of the trees. While this might not be a big clue, this might be useful later.

We’ve also got an intersection coming up. If we follow the road to the intersection, we might be able to see a street sign.

As we go up the road, we see a newspaper box. It looks like it says something like “Democrat and Chronicle”.  This isn’t very clear but if we start running out of hints, this might be worth Googling.

At the intersection, we’ve got almost everything we need to solve this map.

The road that we are on is “West 20A” and it intersects “North Rd 3860S”.  What town? What state? I don’t know, but that’s what we’ll find out next.

I use two main tool to solve these maps.  I use Google Maps (though you can use any map you want) and I use my trusty search engine.  Let’s open up Google Maps and search for “North Rd 3860S”

The first US option that comes up is in Scottsville, NY.

Let’s take a look at it:

Unfortunately, 3860s N Rd in Scottsvlle, NY only goes East/West.  From the intersection, we can see that we are currently on West 20A, so this probably isn’t the right location.

Let’s try North Rd in Geneseo, NY.

North Rd does go North/South and it also intersects right at highway 20A (a.k.a. Lakeville, Rd)

Let’s go to street view and try to find the house in the original photo and track this down to the actual address.

Google street view tells us that this house is at 4950 Lakeville Rd, Geneseo, New York.

We’re not done yet! We still need to find this house on a map. To do this. I’m going back to map view on Google Maps and zoom out so I can get a feel of where in New York Geneseo is.

Geneseo is south of Rochester and east of Buffalo, NY.  That’s a good place to start.

Let’s bring up the little map in Geoguessr and start zooming in.

Here we can see Rochester and Buffalo on the little map.

Next we want to find the intersection of 20A (Lakeville Rd) and North Rd.

First lets find Geneseo.

As we soom in, we can see the intersection.

OK.  Full disclosure.  At this point I clicked on the wrong thing and accidentally made a guess out in the ocean which ended the game but since we got this far, I didn’t want to start all over.  However, I hope this quick walkthrough showed you how I do GEOSINT on Geoguessr. The more you do it, the faster you get.

Tips:#

  1. Every country is different and countries with cultures similar to yours will always be easier. I once spent 2 hours lost in Osaka Japan on this game because I don’t read japanese but my final guess was less that 1km from the actual location. I was very happy with myself for that.
  2. There’s no way to cheat. As I explained when I was stuck in a Japanese map, the main way that I made progress was by looking for advertisements and googling them. I googled telephone numbers that I found in the map and that help more than anything. From there I was able to narrow down my choices a lot.
  3. Pick up on the little thing, especially what is growing in the picture. Are there tree? If so, what kind do they look like? It’s completely OK to google a strange tree. Look at what people are wearing. Look at ethnicity. Look at the condition of roads and houses. Look at the color of the dirt. All of these things can give away important clues about a map.
  4. Read a lot of different kinds of books. Read biographies, travelogues, fiction based on the real world. Learn trivia. Stupid trivia might come in more handy than you can guess. (For example, in which areas will you find palm trees or mainly pine trees?).