Google Maps is an easy way to get a look around the world, and people have found all sorts of things on their virtual travels, from flying rabbits to alien spacecraft.
But one of the strangest must be the giant-sized inflatable baby spotted in the front garden of a suburban home in Riemst, Belgium.
The extraordinary discovery was made while Reddit user Maximus 125 was playing geographic guessing-game Geoguessr online.
The super-sized rugrat was apparently installed to announce the birth of a new baby. It’s customary in the Netherlands to display a model of a stork or something similar to let neighbours that there’s a new arrival in the area.
The giant baby, according to one local replying to the thread on Reddit, is just a somewhat over-the-top version of that.
The new parents are so delighted, in fact, that there’s a sign with a drawing of a stork in the window as well as the blow-up babe.
It’s one of the more benign things spotted in front gardens by the Google Maps photo car. It has also captured an armed police raid, a rude Chelsea fan and what appears to be a man who really needed a poo.
There are also flashers, ghosts, and illicit sexual liaisons to be found if you know where to look.
A local business owner in Edinburgh was forced to apologise to Police Scotland for wasting police time in 2014 after they staged a fake murder for the Google camera car by lying in the road "while his colleague stood over him with a pickaxe handle ".
Google Maps dates back to 2004 but very little of its overhead imagery is more than three years old. Streetview, the technology that allows users anywhere in the world to virtually “visit” roads and other places came online a few years later. Full-screen view came along in 2009 and the service extended inside certain public buildings in 2011.
In 2014, Streetview began offering a window into the past, with the option to look at imagery from earlier scans.
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