to be clear: my VPN is Tailscale configured to use an exit node running out of the apartment I'm currently sitting in.
This is at the bottom of the Google search results page on mobile right?
If so, that location is based on signals from a bunch of places. The logic takes as input:
* Location history in your Google account (if enabled)
* IP address location lookup from the most recent request (if sufficiently accurate)
* HTML5 location API response from previous requests to Google search on your account (since the html5 location API is quite slow, and you don't want to wait 30 seconds for search results).
My guess is you have location history disabled. And you have the html5 location API disabled. And your Seattle IP address doesn't resolve to a very precise location (so is rejected). So the last fallback is the last known location for you, which was probably the hotel WiFi in Mexico, which probably did have a precise geocode associated.
If you want to fix that, you can set a manual location IIRC, or you can enable some other location source.
Yeah, but I can't. The only way I've seen hinted at doing that is letting my browser share location to Google.com and my desktop Firefox can't estimate my location anyway, on top of the fact that I'm not about to give in and fix this by just arbitrarily granting them access to more data about me.
Especially when they clearly have all of this effort around it, dialogs to try and tell me why it thinks I'm in Mexico and won't just give me a way to tell it where I am.
When I was looking for where to buy an SSD and used "shopping.google.com" earlier, I absolutely could not find how to convince it that I was in Seattle. Ironically, a private browser worked there.
And yet, I literally just sat through 3 spanish ads, again on my unsigned in TV that has been sitting in Seattle for a year.
I think you're absolutely right, it's this myriad of data. But it's frustrating that I /can't just easily override it/.
Various companies including Google have systems to determine a phone or computer's location via WiFi. To do this they have a table of the approximate locations of routers worldwide.
How does that table get updated? In part it's due to cell phone traffic. If a cell phone's location is determined in some other way (such as via the cell phone network), they will assume any visible router is nearby. So, for example, this would be a way of finding out where a coffee shop's WiFi is.
If, say, a mobile phone is in Mexico (determined via the cell network or GPS) and it's using an exit node in a different country, the inferred router location is going to be wrong. Ironically, using the VPN from Mexico is probably what broke it.
One way to fix it might be to change the exit node somehow. Or maybe connecting to the VPN while at home, using a cell phone, would fix it?
My Public IPv4 is: 198.244.xx.yy
My Public IPv6 is: 2604:4080:redact
My IP Location is: Seattle, WA US
My ISP is: Wave Broadband