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All text in Brooklyn (alltexts.nyc)
138 points by luu 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments


“All text” would be a better name, I thought it was going to be about SMS messages


you commented and I listened! now it's all branded `all text in nyc` and also redirecting to `alltext.nyc`. Thanks for all the enthusiasm!


    Google Maps Platform rejected your request. 
    This IP, site or mobile application is not
    authorized to use this API key. 
    Request received from IP address [REDACTED],
    with referer: https://www.alltext.nyc/


That's what I expected too, and this immediately reminded me of Wikileak's "all pages from 9/11" site.

https://911.wikileaks.org/


Indeed, the domain is literally alltext.nyc, and not alltexts.nyx (as mistakenly annotated here fsr.)


It was originally alltexts.nyc but changed to alltext.nyc based on the suggestion above.


My vote's for "Word on the street" Probably doesn't translate well to a domain name though


wordseen.nyc has a few layers;

it's short, phonetic, includes "words" (plural), homonyms for "word scene", literally describes the collection of each word seen in public scenery, etc.

Arguably wordscene.nyc also.


(updated above now as well. Thanks!)


The !!Con talk from this weekend about the project: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KqIOR-hofm4&t=23271s


It appears to succeed my litmus test: https://brooklyn.alltexts.nyc/?search=moshiach&page=1

For those who don't know, Chabad, an orthodox Jewish organization, has a large promotional presence in Brooklyn


Penis worked! Very impressive. I agree with the other commenter that the name "all texts" makes me think specifically of text messages.


Not as many results as I was expecting though lol


This is really cool, and hints at a near-future possibility of building a search engine on top of just about anything. It's clear we've moved past the ability to just search for website url's and webpage content. Anything that can be indexed - regardless of type of data or dimension (space, time, etc.) will be searchable.


Crazy that you can't find any 7soulsdeep graffiti on here


was also looking for some KEST GAK stickers


I had the same thought - got some results for "GAK" https://www.alltext.nyc/?search=gak&page=1


Old school "COST" showed up for me as the first result for that word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Cost


Been awhile since I've been out to NYC - is KEST and RIBS still a big thing out there?


KES found some, I think the problem is that most stickers are layered


I tried searching for FREE SMELLS but I think the server is currently overwhelmed


There is much that isn't indexed here. "718" yields less than 4,000 hits, which seems very low. There are many old buildings in Brooklyn that still sport "fallout shelter" signs, but ATiB returns only 13 results for that term, with many duplicate images. Here's an example of a missing result, probably one of thousands: https://maps.app.goo.gl/AdsYFzf7MAZoo4Vc8


Must be bombarded with requests as it is not loading anything for both pizza and farts (dont ask...)


Same here! (Not looking for farts, though :-))


i searched "natural wine", found some new wine shops


Nobody seems to be offering "synthetic wine."


If I search for Google it returns a massive dataset because it is also looking at the Google watermark in the street view scraped data.


Fun app, I'm having a good time!

The OCR has a lot of false positives, though. "Truck" definitely was not what I was looking for, but it makes up a significant amount of the search. "culo" fuzzy/exact results were also surprisingly disappointing :) .

If there's a way to change the text-matching accuracy and add this filter to the front-end, I'd be lost here forever. Switching locations would also be a fun way to scale this up. Throw an Adsense add on there and you're looking at a decent passive income!


I was a bit sad that "kest gak" yielded nothing, but then tried individual "kest" and "gak" and found the familiar tags. Fun site


Side note: kind of cool that nyc gets their own domain. It’s unfortunate that GoDaddy is the registrar though.


It’s been kind of useless honestly. The city allowed the registrars to reserve many domains as “premium” domains, i.e. almost all neighborhoods were reserved with prices in the tens of thousands of dollars. Initially you had to specify a NYC postal address, no PO boxes, allegedly to prevent domains from being scooped up by non-NYC entities. And there was no privacy protection (that seems to have changed).


FWIW it was one of the new gTLDs (2014) https://icannwiki.org/.nyc


GoDaddy is the registry, but not the sole registrar that it can be registered through. Both NameCheap and Gandi are options - and I am sure others too.

NB: I work for GoDaddy, but am not responding in any capacity on their behalf.


I searched a phrase for a pizza place near me that has a slightly stupid name for a type of pizza and alltext found it. Very impressive.


They should do this in the Mission. It might be useful in mapping gang/cartel territories over time


This is such a neat site, thanks for sharing.

I wanted to use a word that I figured would be rarely seen in Brooklyn, so I tried: “Gripe”

The correct identifications center around “Vacuna de la gripe” (flu vaccine).

The remainder are all mismatches, such as “Grape” at a very sharp angle. Funnily, the majority of the mislabeled samples are all due to the “Good Grips” brand logo. This logo has a small underlined “s” at the end that looks like a “E” when you squint at the JPEG. I’ll give the OCR model a pass on this one!


I've been either stunned, or disappointed depending on the word.

"hello" gives four images of the same building with "hello" clearly written, as well as a few images of "hello" grafiti. Impressed

"table" gives six results- four of which are clearly pictures of either leaves or the sky. Two are blurry buildings, but I cant seem to find the text "table"... it could be there though? Not impressed

"car" gives Six unique results, some of which "car" is the prefix of a word. Impressed

Either way, really cool project.


I'm amazed how many NYC addresses have "666" in them!


I swear 666 and 420 are the most common street addresses in the city


I feel like there's a bias for this, where you likely wouldn't register seeing a mundane number a bunch (like say, 378), but 666 and 420 would stick out even once, so you'll remember all the other times you've seen them. From googling though, I'm having trouble finding a name for this that I'm familiar with; the best I can find seems to be salience bias[1], but I'm not sure if that's what I was thinking of; I've certainly never heard of it before.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salience_(neuroscience)#Salien...


I seem to be getting two of every picture for everything I search


is there a way to train this to read graffiti? it would be an awesome tool to see who has the most tags in nyc.


The first thing I searched for was my favorite graffiti[0]. I always see it while walking the dog. It brought up a lot of false positives like 'mart' and 'part' if they were at an angle or partially obscured.

I also tried searching for Blob Dylan since there always seems to be a bunch of those around, and it only brought up 2–3 results[1].

[0]https://www.alltext.nyc/?search=fart [1]https://www.alltext.nyc/?search=blob+dylan


this looks cool! just curious how you extracted all these texts?


No results: cloaca


I tried "google" and it show's all the watermarks in Google Maps, LOL


So you're the one who broke the server?


https://i.imgur.com/xvHD8fK.jpeg

This would be really useful in GeoLocation GeoGuessing games - and in order to ID a location based on any limited text you can discern. Wonder how hard it would be to apply it to other locations.


there is a game that did that, played it during the pandemic, it would start as a google street view and you could move along the street.

the goal was to guess the location as quickly as possible


Geoguessr. Its popularity has only been on a steady rise to this day.

For those curious, there are different modes, including the one where you cannot move along the street at all (but you can look around by turning in that same stationary spot).




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