TikToker tried to gatekeep best bagel sandwich in NYC ...

12 Jun 2023

Yahoo Sport Australia

The popular creator Trevor Rainbolt built a 2.4 million TikTok following from “GeoGuessing” — a game where participants try to find where certain locations are in the world by using Google Maps and a random Google Street View photo.

Twenty-four-year-old Rainbolt, who is professionally known by his last name, is arguably one of the best GeoGuessr players in the world and has found locations in less than one second, and some while blindfolded.

The “professional Google Maps player,” as he’s dubbed himself in his TikTok bio, has also helped a lot of followers pinpoint the locations of old photos or videos just by examining and studying the background.

Rainbolt doesn’t always work alone, however. Finding locations and answers for his followers isn’t always easy, especially when working with individual photographs and limited information. In a recent collaboration, Rainbolt shared that he had spent six months looking for the exact street featured in a childhood photo of a follower’s dad who had died in an accident. He said he worked for over 300 hours and wasn’t having luck.

But after posting about the project on YouTube, it only took an hour to find the street.

It’s remarkable what Rainbolt and his other Google Maps-playing friends can accomplish with little to no information. And while they do a lot of good work for followers looking for answers, sometimes they will dabble in some slightly selfish tasks as well.

Recently, Rainbolt came across a TikToker reviewing a New York City bagel that he dubbed “the greatest sandwich I’ve ever had.” He refused to tell his followers where it was from.

Rainbolt spent over 80 hours looking for the bagel shop. On June 3, after about two weeks of searching, he shared with his Twitter following that he’d figured out where the original TikToker was eating the bagel, but not where it was from. Based on the original video, the TikToker had taken it “to a study room at a local college” and Rainbolt had figured out that the sandwich did not come from the campus itself.

When a Twitter user asked Rainbolt what the payoff was for spending 80 hours looking for a bagel, he simply said, “It’s just for a tiktok.”

Four days later, Rainbolt announced he found the bagel. In a TikTok, he broke down what he and some other Google Maps players had used to narrow it down.

To add to the pettiness of the situation, Rainbolt called the bagel place and convinced them to rename the specific bagel sandwich “The Rainbolt” so that the original TikToker would always remember Rainbolt’s work.

Rainbolt started GeoGuessing during the pandemic, when he’d play for four to five hours every day, not including the amount of time he spent watching others do it on livestreams. He told The Face in November that sometimes he’d play for 12 hours a day and had dreams in Street View — the feature on Google Maps that populates a virtual representation of real-world surroundings.

He described GeoGuessing as “a language” and said the first three things people interested in playing should learn are telephone poles, bollards posts and license plates.

“The more you play, the more you learn; the less you play, the more you forget,” he told The Face.

On May 30, GeoGuessr announced the first GeoGuesser World Cup, a tournament that will be held in mid-October in Stockholm, Sweden.

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The post A TikToker wanted to gatekeep the best bagel in NYC and almost did, until a Google Maps expert spent 80 hours looking for it appeared first on In The Know.