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I'm in Bristol, England, and Careers appears to know that (my Profile page shows "Bristol, England"). Whenever I visit the homepage, though, Careers shows a section for "jobs near worcester".

Now, I'm sure Worcester has a lot going for it, but it's a relatively small city more than 50 miles away from where I am, so I'm just curious as to (a) why Careers is so keen to show me jobs near Worcester, and (b) if there's any way of telling the homepage to show me jobs near where I live, instead?

EDIT: I've since checked Careers from work (dangerous!) rather than home and it shows me jobs from London, which is even further away from me. So I guess it's ignoring what I've specified and guessing, wrongly, by IP address.

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  • 1
    Maybe certain SO employees have been receiving bribes from the Worcester Chamber of Commerce in order to tweak the filters. I'm looking at you, @Marc!
    – Pekka
    Commented Jun 12, 2011 at 21:57
  • 4
    Seriously though, the only possible explanation I can think of is that the system has trouble resolving "Bristol, England" and uses IP based geolocation instead, which could lead to it being 50 miles off... Maybe try "Bristol, United Kingdom" - even though it sounds really unlikely
    – Pekka
    Commented Jun 12, 2011 at 21:59
  • It does use GeoIP and I think that the answer before was that for international cities, that nothing in particular was going to be done.
    – jcolebrand
    Commented Jun 12, 2011 at 22:10
  • @Pekka If I enter either "Bristol, United Kingdom" or "Bristol, England", the entry is auto-corrected to "Bristol, England, United Kingdom" on the entry page. When saved, it appears on the Profile page as "Bristol, England." So, it seems to be able to resolve it just fine. Also, I've never been mistakenly GeoIPd to Worcester before. London, yes, and Yorkshire, but never Worcester. Odd.
    – Matt Gibson
    Commented Jun 12, 2011 at 23:54
  • @Matt weird. Then I don't know what this could be - one of the devs will surely be able to tell more in due time
    – Pekka
    Commented Jun 12, 2011 at 23:55
  • @jcolebrand What makes a city particularly "international"? :)
    – Matt Gibson
    Commented Jun 12, 2011 at 23:56
  • Incidentally, if it's actually GeoIP (the MaxMind one) their demo page mistakenly finds me in London, which is a shame, but understandable; I guess it might be where my ISP has an office registered. (I wonder if I can just get an entry put in their database? I have a fixed IP with a fixed physical address...)
    – Matt Gibson
    Commented Jun 13, 2011 at 0:02
  • @MattGibson not being in the US (SE is notoriously US-centric, much to the individual user's chagrin, regardless of the users location)
    – jcolebrand
    Commented Jun 13, 2011 at 0:34
  • If you tell your HR department about Careers, you could use their utility of the site for candidate-search as a safe mask to access Careers yourself. ♪
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Jun 13, 2011 at 13:02
  • 1
    The rumors about the Worcester Chamber of Commerce are vicious and, um, hopefully unprovable.
    – Matt Sherman Staff
    Commented Jun 15, 2011 at 0:56
  • 2
    can you kindly relocate to the proper location specified in our database, please?
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Jun 15, 2011 at 6:38
  • @Matt Damn those Worcesterians. You'd have thought Bristol had more spare "petty cash"! (Allegedly...)
    – Matt Gibson
    Commented Jun 15, 2011 at 8:53
  • @Jeff Well, I hear Worcester's quite nice. It's a heck of a manual workaround, though... Ask me again once I've found an IP address to rent that geolocates in Tahiti!
    – Matt Gibson
    Commented Jun 15, 2011 at 8:55

1 Answer 1

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The commenters basically have it — we are using MaxMind’s GeoIP and there are limits to its resolution.

(I like the idea of showing jobs by one’s profile location first, and falling back to IP geo, we’ll implement soon.)

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  • Thanks for the answer; I'd agree that giving priority to the profile location would be a bit more intuitive. Especially in countries where the GeoIP location is not so much limited in resolution as "pretty much random", in my experience :)
    – Matt Gibson
    Commented Jun 15, 2011 at 8:58
  • 8
    Soon? How much longer?
    – Aaron Hall
    Commented Feb 19, 2016 at 3:56

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