Re: IP Lookup Tables

[afoken]

Just a little reminder: Guessing the user's location from the user's IP address is just that - guessing. I've explained one problem with IP address location years ago in Re: Help with Geo::IP output. And if you think that things got better over the past years, you are completely wrong. It got worse:

Google tries to guess my location from my IP address. I'm still using the same internet provider, who is strictly local to Hamburg and the surrounding areas in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. My IP address changes every 24 hours, simply because almost all providers in Germany do so (and demand an extra fee for a fixed IP address, or just completely refuse to provide private users with a fixed IP address). And so, every now and then, Google guesses that I'm somewhere in Ukraine, switches the user interface to Ukrainain with Cyrillic letters all over. And of course, because Youtube belongs to Google, all of the video ads are in Ukrainain. I don't mind video ads in foreign languages, because I simply bypass them. But switching the search engine to Ukrainian is really annoying, because most search results are Ukrainian and it is hard to switch the Google website back to English or German.

My guess is that perhaps some of the Ukrainian refugees run VPN servers located in or around Hamburg for the people in the Ukraine, and so parts of my provider's IP range look like they are in the Ukraine. Or perhaps it's just that a lot of the Ukrainian refugees use my provider, and use Google to search in Ukrainain for information from the Ukraine. Combined with the regular change of IP addresses, every now and then I might get an IP address that had a very strong relation to the Ukraine for a few days.

Of course, that guessing by Google is utterly nonsense. The IP address ranges used by my provider are used only in and around Hamburg. And that does not change, even if a lot of traffic is related to the Ukraine at the moment.

Alexander