This article was published on March 3, 2016

Creep yourself out by searching YouTube for your address


Creep yourself out by searching YouTube for your address Image by: YouTube

YouTube doesn’t have an official way to search by address, but a YouTube experiment on GitHub lets you type in a street name and it’ll dig up every video shot in that area.

The results can be a little creepy or just plain weird, as Reddit found out. People have found clips like this guy losing a fish because of a dog and this twenty-minute long video of a dude riding a bus around.

For my part, I looked up the area I stayed in last time I visited San Francisco and found this epic slow-mo of a cat drinking water and this weird video of trampoline dodgeball, which apparently exists.

You can be as precise or as vague as you like about the address and YouTube will throw the closest videos it has up for you. Lots of videos don’t have geolocation data, so you won’t get everything, but it’s amazing what’s actually there.

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It uses both the YouTube and Google APIs to determine the location of a video, and the team behind it built the tool to show that news organizations could search by location to find relevant videos when a story is developing.

YouTube Geo Search Tool [GitHub]

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