Fixing Google geolocation screwups

Wed May 6 01:36:34 UTC 2015

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 10:56:22AM +1000, Mark Andrews wrote:
> In message <20150505210746.GH22158 at hezmatt.org>, Matt Palmer writes:
> > On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 12:03:23PM -0400, Luan Nguyen wrote:
> > > There's a form here - https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip
> > > But google is pretty smart, its systems will learn the correct geolocation
> > > over time...
> > 
> > That'd be quite a trick, given that the netblock practically can't be used
> > at all with Google services.
> 
> One would expect support.google.com to not be geo blocked just like
> postmaster@ should not be filtered.  That said they can always
> disable IPv6 temporarially (or just firewall off the IPv6 instance
> of support.google.com and have the browser fallback to IPv4) and
> reach support.google.com over IPv4 to lodge the complaint.

I was specifically responding to the suggestion that Google would
automagically "learn" the correct location of the netblock, presumably based
on the characteristics of requests coming from the range.  Being explicitly
told that a given netblock is in a given location (as effective, or
otherwise, as that may be) doesn't really fit the description of "systems
[learning] the correct geolocation over time".

- Matt

-- 
Skippy was a wallaby. ... Wallabies are dumb and not very trainable...  The
*good* thing...is that one Skippy looks very much like all the rest,
hence..."one-shot Skippy" and "plug-compatible Skippy".  I don't think they
ever had to go as far as "belt-fed Skippy" 	-- Robert Sneddon, ASR