all text in sf

"all text in sf" is a search engine that reveals the hidden textual landscape of San Francisco through Google Street View imagery. By entering any text in the search bar, visitors can discover where words appear throughout the city's streets—from shop signs to graffiti, from advertisements to protest signs.

The project transforms routine street documentation into a tool for urban exploration. Through the lens of optical character recognition (OCR), it enables a digital drift - an unplanned journey through the city's linguistic terrain, revealing unexpected connections and patterns in our urban environment.

As AI-powered surveillance systems increasingly capture and analyze our public spaces, "all text in sf" invites users to consider the implications of digital documentation while celebrating the rich tapestry of text that shapes our city's character. Each search becomes a unique drift through New York's textual geography, creating new pathways of discovery that challenge our conventional navigation of urban space.

The current collection of queriable streetviews spans from 2007 to 2024. Most indexed text are in English or other languages using the Latin alphabet.