In my time perusing endless dead forums and online threads, I’ve come across many people that take a certain voyeuristic fascination with Google’s ambitious and ubiquitous cataloguing of the world around us. I would say the obsession stems especially from the Street View program, wherein Google sends panoramic automobile-mounted cameras to most catalogued roads in participating countries. I’m not the only one who has spent far too much time looking for something, anything interesting; the online forum Reddit has made a list of “ghost towns” around the United States and users such as myself experience a thrill when we can vicariously explore isolated towns and come across bizarre sights like pranks, sculptures, or even crimes in progress. Internet users have endlessly compiled lists of intriguing locations, from winding roads in Pennsylvania to the abandoned city of Hashima, Japan. Google Earth’s forums have since been scrapped and replaced, but there are endless people posting coordinates of strange or interesting things they’ve found (mostly, these posts have no replies).

A certain fringe community seems attracted to such communities–various people find island chains or odd buildings and convince themselves they’ve found alien spacecraft or even Atlantis. The more interesting sites, however, are those that lend themselves to intrigue. Certain areas around the world are “censored” into a pixelated mass by Google; most of these locations are NATO military installations but a few locations (like Russian CEO Alexei Miller’s house) are also obfuscated. I’ve found “traveling” to infamous countries to be very satisfying–one can view politically isolated countries like Eritrea and North Korea by satellite, although no roads are catalogued. Even more engaging, however, is the small community of people sharing their interesting finds, which invariably gain traction on the more list-focused websites like Listverse. Regardless, Google Earth and Street View and its fans have found a way to appreciate the small, most out of the way locations provided by such a powerful tool, and for that I must call this community truly obscure.