Which is the most recognisable county indoor opinion?

DEDICATED FANS of

Google

Street View, which lets users explore cities and towns around the world via panoramic street-level imagery, have come up with dozens of applications for the tool, from house-hunting, to holiday planning, to experimental art. The most entertaining use of the service may be “

Geoguessr

”, a game created in 2013 by Anton Wallén, a Swedish IT consultant. The premise of

Geoguessr

is simple:

players

are dropped at random places in

Google

Street View, without any information about their locations. They are

then

scored based on how well they guess where they are.

Geoguessr

is a fun way to kill

time

. But it

also

offers a clever way to determine which parts of the world are the most recognisable, and who can recognise them best. With

this

in mind, The Economist obtained some 1.2m guesses from the online geography quiz, submitted by 223,942 people in 192

countries

and territories between January and August 2020. We

then

used these data to compile a “recognisability index” for each

country

, defined as the share of

players

who guessed correctly where they were dropped minus the share who guessed incorrectly. (We excluded games in which a player was dropped into his or her own

country

and

countries

that appeared in the dataset fewer than 20,000 times). According to our analysis, Japan is by far the most recognisable

country

.

Geoguessr

players

dropped there correctly guessed their

location

64% of the

time

; those dropped elsewhere incorrectly guessed Japan just 9% of the

time

. In

second

place is

America

, which

players

guessed correctly 79% of the

time

and incorrectly 40% of the

time

. Russia ranks

third

, followed by Italy, Brazil and Britain (see chart). As for which

countries

were most often confused for one another, 18% of

players

who reckoned they had been dropped in

America

were actually in Australia. Spain and Mexico were

also

frequently mixed up. Not all of the guesses made sense: at least one person mistook Luxembourg for Mongolia. Germany and Switzerland are home to the best

Geoguessr

players

, followed by France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. At the bottom of our list is Turkey, followed by Russia and

America

, where

players

correctly guessed their

location

just 45% of the

time

.

Geoguessr

scores do

however

depend on how close the guesser is in kilometres to the right

location

. If borders are involved, some guessers might score highly even when they plump for the wrong

country

. So picking Vancouver would give a greater score than New York, if the dropped

location

was Seattle. Curiously,

players

in Norway, Sweden and Colombia are better at identifying the

country

where they are dropped than the precise

location

. In

America

, the skills are reversed. Americans score about as well as Brits in figuring out their approximate

location

, but are abysmal at picking the right

country

.

Such

results should be taken with a big pinch of salt. Not all

countries

are included in

Google

Street View. Of those that are, many have incomplete coverage. Most streets in Germany,

for example

, are missing from

Google

Maps because of privacy concerns; China is

also

missing, with the exceptions of Macau and Hong Kong. With those caveats, it is still pleasing to be the

country

with the landscapes and cityscapes considered most distinctive. Japan’s tourism industry, after all, is unlikely to complain.