Every word in NYC’s streetscape

Explore how artist Yufeng Zhao used millions of #Google #StreetView images to create a searchable map of every word written on #NewYork City’s streets — revealing hidden patterns and the power of urban data at the intersection of art and technology.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

July 29, 2025

The Pudding1 presents a fascinating piece at the intersection of spatial data and art: Artist and technologist Yufeng Zhao combed through an enormous trove of Google Street View images, extracting every piece of text visible in New York City’s streets and making this data available for exploration and analysis.

From the piece:

The result is a search engine of much of what’s written in NYC’s streets. (…) The scale of the data is immense: over 8 million Google Street View images (from the past 18 years) and 138 million identified snippets of text.

Occurrences of “Broadway” (source: Yufeng Zhao)

Needless to say: Some fascinating spatial patterns and unexpected insights emerge2 from NYC’s urban textscape. To me, this project highlights the often untapped potential of ephemeral crowdsourced data.

Bonus: There is a 2024 talk by Yufeng Zhao (10 minutes long) on how he built this Street View search engine.

Footnotes

  1. An online publication that “makes awesome stories with data”.↩︎

  2. In the true sense of “emergence”↩︎