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How To Clean Up Incorrect Geolocation Information?

Posted by samzenpus on from the 123-fake-street dept.

zorro6 writes "I thought this might be an interesting question/topic and it would sure help me to get some kind of answer. I recently got internet service from a small, local wireless ISP in my area (south central Colorado, USA). The strange thing is that many, many web sites think I am in Quebec, Canada when I use the service. Evidently some geolocation service thinks my IP address indicates I am in Canada. I have checked the obvious. The WHOIS information for my IP correctly indicates a location of Durango, CO. So the bad info is coming from some more sophisticated geolocation service. My ISP is at a loss as to how to fix this but it is causing me a lot of grief. Many of the ads I get shown on Yahoo! for instance are in French! Certain sites won't sell me goods or services because they don't do business in Canada. So far I know that Yahoo! (or their ad provider), Nvidia, Movielink, etc. all think I am in Canada. I would sure appreciate any help/info on how to get this corrected."

2 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Re:possibly stating the obvious by TubeSteak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would have suggested he have his ISP assign him different IPs until he gets one that geolocates to America.

    "Don't know what's going on" is different from "we can't resolve the matter"

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
  2. Re:happened to me by Dak+RIT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Geolocation services are just large databases that map IP addresses to physical locations. There's really nothing else to it. Who owns a set of IP addreses can also change quite frequently, and so these databases need constant updating.

    As an example, here's the FAQ provided by a geolocation service I've used in the past:

    GEO I/O compiles several sources of data to achieve 99% accuracy at the country level, 85% at the state/regional level, 80% at the (US) city level (within a 25-mile radius), and 60% accuracy for cities outside of the US. The data is stored in a proprietary format, limiting our ability to make individual changes to it, however the database is updated monthly by our data providers.

    Basically, it will get fixed when the group maintaining the data updates it, which in my experience can be anywhere from a couple weeks to a year.