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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

This is achievable with geolocation based on IP address, which is how it works on, e.g. a desktop web browser.

Not in my country - unless your ISP is in the business of selling customer PII to advertisers (coughvirgincough) your IP geolocation will often be a completely different city.

Of course, personally if I wanted to search for nearby bakeries on my phone I'd have just opened the google maps app....

Less than half the population has decent geolocation by IP. Most people the IP address will only identify the country or even nothing at all.

Not much use if you want to search bakery's.

Google is my ISP. My geolocated IP is accurate within a 15 mile radius. It doesn't matter if I have location services turned off or I'm using my desktop, searching "bakeries near me" finds them without issue.

I suspect that isn't all just one big coincidence.

Google has what 3 or 4 cities where they operate as an ISP, each with a pretty small footprint. It's no surprise anyone knows where you are.

A cable or telephone company has generalized coverage measured in states; some of them organize their network and customer IPs by small geographies, but sometimes all of southern california is in a single pool of IPs.

Coming from the CDN land this isnt true. We didnt put too much effort in to precision, but on the order of 99% of IP addresses get down to metro area. Cheap commerical providers like Maxmind get to the right postcode on the order of 90-95% of the time. Building your own latency and peering maps bridges that gap to 99% or better. Simply based on network topology and latency we should be able to get you down to post code or general area of a city.

"Achievable" is quite charitable from my experience. With the previous ISP I would get located in a city some 2000kms away, sometimes the scam ads would detect my location as null.

Maybe it's more effective in places like the US.

No, I’m randomly placed 2 states away. A solid day of driving.

funny how that works. I never ever allow location access to anything Google or any website for that matter, and have a muscle memory to hit deny when the browser prompts me. The other day I was searching something and then clicking my bookmarked Google News and suddenly all news were UK specific, and my search results fro "heatpumps" were are UK companies and products.. I was confused until I noticed that my work VPN chose a UK endpoint because the NL one where I am had higher latencies. So, Google heavily tailors the results based on where it thinks you're at. Also, I was delighted to know that inspire all the tracking Google probably does on me, it was easily fooled to think I was in the UK :-)

IP-based location is mostly usable for country. I've rarely found it gets the city right, often it doesn't even get the county right.

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