Hacker News Reader

Comment by exit | Hacker News Reader

i hate when my internet experience is "localized" with shit like "g'day mate".

the internet is a place in and of itself.

Spend a year overseas. You'll really love the sites which decide that your accept-language header is irrelevant, and feed you stuff in a language you can't read.

Just to rub in the culture shock.

Why Google look at your location rather than the browsers preferred language to chose language with is just beyond me. Oh, and then I go to Google Maps and it always shows me the US no matter where I am.

They do it because many people and most cybercafes around the world have their language configured incorrectly in their browsers. Most of the time, for novice users, the geo targeting is more accurate than browser settings.

I agree, it's hugely annoying.

the google maps = USA thing is probably because either you haven't set your location in google settings (or wherever...there's a thing), or you configure your browser to throw away cookies.

I've found that google.com/maps always shows the US, but google.{co.uk,de,es,fr,it,ru, etc etc}/maps will always show a sensible viewport.

In this case, I think I prefer that approach.

Ah, that could be. My access method is pretty much "^Lma<cr>"

yeah, i move around europe a lot, sigh...

yeah I read that and thought "gosh how patronising would that be".

also geolocation fails for my IP, says I'm 35 miles away from where I am, which in UK terms is quite far.

That's pretty good in my book. I live in Cornwall, and there are lovely girls in Cheltenham just dying to speak to me...

In my case, it thinks I'm 470 miles away from where I am. It got the country right though (NZ).

I think geolocation using an IP address is known to not be particularly reliable when you try to drill down to the city level - having said that, it was spot on with my city.

Plus geolocation almost always fails on a phone in my experience, the IPs generally come from the datacenter of the carrier (my old Alltel phone always said I was in Alabama, almost 1000 miles away).

That probably just means they are doing geolocation by IP instead of trying the HTML5 browser-based geolocation service first.

If they used HTML5 geolocation instead, they'd burden the user with an annoying authorization popup (at least on the browsers I use).

edit: (The lesson, then, is to not do web geolocation unless it strongly enriches the usefulness of the site (map-related sites, etc) or your hand is forced. People rightly don't want their location freely-shared and people are rightly annoyed by location-sharing-confirmation popups.)

It's unusual for a geoloc service to find me (I'm in Plymouth, UK but my ISP is always listed as Newton Abbot) - but this one manages.

I got London and I'm on the Dorset/Devon border.

I find the "personalised" geolocation stuff mildly annoying in general - and not only because it's invariably miles off. It doesn't show me a site 'cares'. If anything, it looks lazy.

If it's for showing prices in my currency rather than dollars then that's useful, but more often than not it's to show some stupid "What ho, old bean!" message. I'm a Northerner living in cider country - you may as well have said that in Spanish!

I'm in a rural area of the US, and my home IP geolocates to the state capitol - more than 200 mi away.

Geolocators usually just do the equivalent of a `whois -a` and use the address of whoever owns the block of IP addresses, i.e. your ISP.

I don't think that's it - all geolocators, even those that employ advanced techniques, can only get as far as the capitol.

What? No. My IP does not locate to my state's capitol.

I'm quite obviously speaking about myself.

all geolocators, even those that employ advanced techniques, can only get as far as the capitol.

no, not obviously.

You're upset that a random website on the Internet doesn't know exactly where you are?

I win the ip-distance-error game! I'm in Stanford, California, but sites think I'm in Quebec, 4000 miles away. We have google fiber for internet, and apparently the ip block they use previously belonged to a Quebec ISP.

Craigslist always comes up in French for me and shows me Quebec listings. And for a while we couldn't log into our bank of America web account because they don't allow foreign logins.

Maybe a better example for the site/pitch would be to show localized currency or a news ticker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com