The website country tool is giving some smart-aleck answers, which I assume means it can't determine where my sites are based, is that right? ------- I moved my .com site to a UK web server, on a shared UK IP. It worked. Google started listing it under 'UK only' searches. Then I asked for a dedicated UK IP number for my site. Got it 17th March. Just noticed yesterday, after a week or do decline in hits, that I wasn't now coming up in the 'UK only' results. I checked with the ISP and RIPE whois, and and my new number is listed as GB all right. Any clues? Google using old database? New IP = Google takes a few weeks to catch up? Cheesed off at the mo'
'20, 000 leagues under the Sea' was one. It'd be funny, if I weren't in a tizz trying to work out what's amiss with my site. Edit: I put in the site IP address. It gave the location as 'Lost City Of Atlantis'. I assume it means something's up, but it's an obscure way to put it. Edit 2: Reverse DNS reports: "No PTR records exist for ..." my IP number. Is that bad? Edit 3: Another tool at http://www.dnsstuff.com says it's a UK IP number. I'm off to the caff. I'm hungry, and low blood sugar is making me tetchy.
Geo-Targetting is hard stuff and never going to be 100% accurate - I have my own geo-target IP web page using a different approach, and it messes up all the time. I did get a chuckle out of the funny responses when the location could not be determined - good sense of humor on the part of the programmer! ;-)
That reminds me... the database is a little out of date, and been meaning to load a new one in there. It has the new one now, so see if it knows where the IP is at now.
Shawn's tool shows my site as being in the UK, Alek's, as being in the US. Shawn, does that mean Google's database could be out of date? I posted a similar thread on webmasterworld.com, and one poster said I should check how new the IP range, my site's in, was. Might be of interest to non-US users: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum7/1328-2-10.htm Interesting that a web host can purchase an IP range assigned to another country, and would have to re-register them as belonging to the new country. EDIT: Well, my web host has now enabled reverse DNS. The IP block I'm on was bought over two months ago. May have to revert to the old IP, if this keeps up. Hey ho.
What's the website address you are trying to lookup? BTW, I gave the tool an overhaul... updated the data, it drills down to Country -> Region -> City (instead of just country) as well as maps the longitude/latitude of the physical location to a link to maps.google.com.
So where does your site actually reside?!? ;-) BTW, my money would be on Shawn's tool - I slapped mine togather a few years ago, and the Perl Module Database it uses is a bit dated - see Shawn's geo-IP page for more info on his approach, but looks like he buying at least part of the IP2Location Database.
http://www.tigertom.com Definitely in the UK. IP block bought about 2 months ago, according to my ISP. Sent a fax to Google about it. Got an email reply, asking me to send details to another of their departments. So we'll see what happens. If they don't fix it, I suppose I'll ask my web host to move it back to the old IP.
My tool shows you as being in the UK. Drilling a little deeper, it does seem to be correct: http://www.ripe.net/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searchtext=85.92.66.12
I added mapping support to it before, but now that Google has a UK version for street maps, I added that as well. So for IPs in UK and Ireland, it should (hopefully) show map of where the IP is registered.
Doesn't have the toggle for satellite imaging yet either, but it's still pretty cool how quickly it followed the US/Canada one. Google seems to be putting a lot of new stuff quickly into it.