So anyways my location icon says I live about 20 miles away from my house, and a friend helped me test this out and it showed that she lives at least 100 miles from her home too... thats not very accurate... I mean it would be nice if it were like within a mile, but 100 miles?! whats wrong with this?
As I understand it tracks the location where IP is registered. I believe AOL and Earthlink have headquarters in Virginia Area and many IPs of theirs are registered there regardless of where your home is. In rural areas like where I am there are no local ISPs. Most of our residents appear to be located in the larger metropolitan area to our north. Shannon
Just to build on what Smyrl said it isn't the Geo Tracker itself that is inaccurate... just the tools available to pinpoint an IP address. In my case I'm typically connected to a VPN which makes my location appear a couple thousand miles away from where I really am. Even when using my local ISP the location is off by about 700 miles. But it isn't the fault of the Geo Tracker, just that mapping an IP address to a set of coordinates is a guess at best.
If this is common knowledge, why aren't the tools modified to get better results? I mean, there HAS to be some way, because there are sites I've been to that do successfully call out where I'm from. By the way... I'm near Long Beach, California... and DP Geo-target thought I was in VIRGINIA! I guess you can count Verizon as one of those Virginia-based IP owners. I also looked up my company's domain name, which our host had told us was in Washington D.C. ... Geo-target said it was in Colorado. Hopefully it's just the IP and not the server that's in Colorado or I'm gonna have to give our host a nasty phone call
Yes, there are some geo-IP databases that are better than others. Normally the more expensive they are the more accurate they are. But no system based on IP addresses will ever be 100% accurate. For example whenever I'm not in my office (which is almost all of the time) I'm connected to my VPN server to encrypt all of my internet traffic. Therefore my IP address shown to the world is that of my VPN server. My VPN server is sitting in its rack in a data center where it will not move. But I move around frequently. I can be anywhere in the world and my IP address will always be the same. Anyone who surfs via a proxy server will also have the same problem. Same thing goes for corporations. The last company I worked for had several properties around the US. When we surfed the web our traffic was routed through internet firewalls setup at corporate headquarters which was on the other side of the country from where I was. So in short some tools are better than others, however none will be 100% accurate using the current methodologies of mapping and IP to a physical location.