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When I'm logged into StackOverflow it shows a side bar advert for "jobs near London", it knows I live 400 miles away in Glasgow because I've told it that in my profile, so why isn't it showing me more relevant information?

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    Because you live in Glasgow...you should really move. :p
    – Bart
    Jun 5, 2012 at 11:34
  • :-) There's nothing wrong with Glasgow. It's actually a fairly nice city.
    – Colin Mackay
    Jun 5, 2012 at 12:26
  • Going through some old bugs and I'm marking this as "by design" as it's not really a bug that can actually be fixed, as such!
    – Alex Warren StaffMod
    May 6, 2014 at 10:35
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    Why can it not be fixed? My profile says where I live. If I put that manually in the search box it gives me relevant results. It seems that "not really a bug that can actually be fixed" is not an accurate statement.
    – Colin Mackay
    May 6, 2014 at 12:41
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    @AlexWarren: I second the question. If a user has manually entered a location in their profile, shouldn't that override any detection based on IP? (I also can't see why it would be particularly hard to implement) Personally, I get recommendations for jobs in Netherlands although I live in Finland...
    – Aleksi Torhamo
    Feb 2, 2015 at 14:39

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We determine the location based on IP address, and yours happens to resolve to London... One reason for this could be that you're connected through a VPN.

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    Interesting, but since I have set a location in my profile surely that should override it?
    – Colin Mackay
    Jun 5, 2012 at 13:22
  • Basically, I've never had my IP address resolve to the correct location. My work is obviously resolving to London (I'm sure it used to resolve to Edinburgh, which at least is only 40 miles away). And my home IP address (which has been static for 8 years) resolves to Rochdale in the north of England (because that's where the HQ of my ISP is located)
    – Colin Mackay
    Jun 5, 2012 at 13:23
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    @ColinMackay I live in a small town in Ohio, and basically have had that exact same issue with my prior provider; My IP address always suggested I was in Columbus, Ohio, when I'm really 80 miles away and there are other, decent-sized, intervening towns. My current provider's IP address seems to be tagged right smack-dab on my city, though.
    – Andrew Barber
    Jun 5, 2012 at 13:26
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    I second Colin's question about why the manually entered location in your profile doesn't override the automatic IP-based detection. Getting job adverts from Netherlands is useless when I live in Finland... (VPN being the reason in my case; my profile correctly lists Finland as my location)
    – Aleksi Torhamo
    Feb 2, 2015 at 14:42
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    I'm in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) but I switched to a new ISP (TekSavvy) that for some reason routes all my traffic through Toronto (Ontario, Canada), so SE thinks I'm in Toronto as a result (with no VPN!). It's a shame because I rather like keeping abreast on what sort of positions are available even though I'm not actively looking. It makes the job sidebar (which comprises most of the ads I see on SO due to my rep level) virtually useless. I have my real location set in my profile too.
    – Cameron
    Jan 1, 2016 at 1:01
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    A lot of UK domestic IP addresses resolve to London, or distant areas, due to a general lack of IP address range outside of North America (over half of allocated IP addresses are managed by ARIN, after all), and the fact that most ISPs operate nationally with few peering points, or native infrastructure (most is white labelled BT Openreach services). In light of this, and in the ongoing pursuit of maintaining relevance in your ads, it would make sense to use the information in the profile over IP.
    – Rowland Shaw
    Feb 9, 2016 at 20:38

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