Good question. It serves no purpose except to enable you the viewer to embark on a voyeuristic journey of discovery
What is Google Street View?
Another great question - this page has all sorts of great descriptions
I can't see the Street Views
The only reason that makes any sense is that you don't have the latest version of Flash™ installed - you can download it here. Another reason might be that you're using a text based browser - unfortunately, ASCII rendering works in Quake but not yet in Flash
Is this site part of Google?
No. Nada. Absolutely not. This site is not affiliated with Google™ in any way
Have you ever seen a Google Street View vehicle yourself?
Yes, I have - shortly after I launched this site when I was on the US-101 driving to work. I snapped some pictures with my phone here and here
Those thumbnail screenshots are pretty cool - how did you do them?
One of my other projects is a library that lets you render Web content in 3D - some similar code allows me to render the Street View, overlay a watermark in 3D and save the resulting output to a file
Street Views in 3D - that sounds like fun but completely useless
Yes and yes. You can see what it looks like here, here and here
How many Street Views are there on this site?
There are 2982 Street Views currently listed on this site - look at the "By location" page for how this breaks down by city.
A lot of sites have the same views - how do you remove duplicates?
It's quite a tricky problem. You can't just compare latitude and longitude - sometimes they are the same for different views. I also need to compare the rotation and pitch for each and decide if they are close enough to be classed as the same. If they are, I discard the newer one.
What makes the site?
Love and caffeine. There is a C++ Python application that grabs all the content, makes thumbnails and builds the site from scratch each time in a few seconds. Don't ask me why - it just seemed like a good idea at the time and I've stuck with it
Why no RSS feed?
The site is remade from scratch each time I update anything - it only takes a few seconds but makes it trickier to generate an RSS feed reliably
Why no support for tags?
I do have tags for each view but they need cleaning up. Once I've done that, I'll probably build a tag cloud and allow you to select matching Street Views in a similar fashion to the list of locations
Why no search?
The whole site is regenerated each time something changes so nothing is stored in a database. This means making a search engine that's worth anything is a slightly different challenge. I will get to it one day.
