That's France.

Taiwan.

Nigeria.

[Narrator] Welcome to the world of geo guessing.

New Zealand.

Is that Iceland.

Maybe Ghana here is my best guess.

[Narrator] 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.

[Narrator] Wired talked to GeoGuessr, Trevor Rainbolt.

If you look at this possum guard,

those are distinct to Tasmania in Australia.

There is an eastern road in North Macedonia

where there's dead flies on the camera.

[Narrator] 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.

[Narrator] 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 painted 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 usually 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 a calculated guess

and every single guess.

[Narrator] Now let's look at some tips and tricks

for GeoGuessr.

The first thing I always tell people to learn

is telephones poles, bollards.

Learning what's at the road countries drive on

is extremely important.

There is a couple things that we're looking for

on utility poles to telephones 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,

because all these different things together

are very helpful in 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 telephones 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 telephones 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 bollard,

you know you're gonna be in that country.

There's a website called geohints.com too

that has all the bollards listed out,

that'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 the 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 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 gonna be the UK,

or sometimes France.

[Narrator] Even the length of a license plate is a clue.

[Trevor] Mexico has short colorful plates,

where Ecuador has short and long plates.

And then there's Brazil that only has long plates.

[Narrator] Some spots are easily recognizable

because of unique characteristics.

Sometimes it's the shape of the sign.

[Trevor] 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 the north.

[Narrator] And sometimes it's really just knowing

about the Google Map car.

North Kyrgyzstan and South Kyrgyzstan

were covered by different people,

to where one in the south was shorter,

so the reflection of the camera on the rear mirror

was at a different angle,

so you would learn what percentage of the road

you could see on the mirror,

so you could tell you're in South Kyrgyzstan versus North.

[Narrator] And if you've seen Trevor's TikToks,

you know he's able to guess the locations

by literally just the soil.

Soil guessing really goes into every single guess.

But basically what 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.

[Narrator] 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 road 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 like one of the easiest pinpoint world countries,

because there's just road numbers and towns everywhere.

[Narrator] 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 bollard

than most usual bollards,

and those are only really found in Scotland and France.

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

[Narrator] 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 like 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 is 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 locationss

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.