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Given that my profile says Manchester, UK and our netblock is registered with Ripe NCC in Rochdale - which last time I checked was comfortably within Greater Manchester - why is it that Stack Overflow Careers never shows any Manchester based jobs?

The job adverts on the Stack Overflow homepage say "More jobs near London...". It's pretty much 200 miles from Manchester to Central London, not exactly a standard compute.

I'm mostly asking as my employer has a job advert up on Careers at the moment and not one of us developers has actually seen it (or any other Manchester based job) displayed on the Stack Overflow site.

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  • 11
    UK != London? TIL Jan 23, 2014 at 17:10
  • Depending on how many buildings you look at London/its greater metropolitan area has between 13% and 21.5% of the total population of the UK @Nick. Apparently some mad(wo?)man at city hall has decided that 33% of the country lives there. Your initial guess wasn't that far off unfortunately :-(. Jan 23, 2014 at 17:17
  • blame yahoo? It would be good to know if this question and answer is still valid.
    – rene
    Jan 23, 2014 at 17:21
  • 1
    @benisuǝqbackwards but that still leaves somewhere between 78.5% and 87% of people in the UK fed up that websites just tend to assume London. Jan 23, 2014 at 17:25
  • 4
    Well yeah, everyone knows that England is London. TvTropes says so: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritainIsOnlyLondon
    – neminem
    Jan 23, 2014 at 18:33
  • @rene: Yeah, sounds like "blame Yahoo!" time again. Although apparently the SE folks can make local customizations, if the problem is egregious enough. Jan 23, 2014 at 20:15
  • I looked at that question I linked because my city is spelled incorrect while I was sure I corrected it. Turned out it is a feature :-) @IlmariKaronen
    – rene
    Jan 23, 2014 at 20:19
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    A Canadian once told me that there's this place called Scotland in England too. Jan 24, 2014 at 0:56
  • @MartinSteel we're looking into this Jan 24, 2014 at 14:38

2 Answers 2

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Looks like we had an older database (approx 2 months old) in place. We just updated to the latest version and this seems to have resolved the issue - sorry about this! Let us know if you still experience this issue.

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  • Cheers for fixing that, I can now see Manchester jobs. Jan 27, 2014 at 11:21
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It's certainly broken. Looks like there 2 issues:

1) Currently, I think it seems to just use an IP location lookup. Except the IP lookup seems to be a bit broken, because it thinks that you're in London, whereas the netblock is Rochdale.

2) If you are logged in, and you've set a location in your careers profile, that should override the IP lookup anyway.

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  • SO & Careers are totally separate. Information on your Careers profile has no bearing on how SO works.
    – Juice StaffMod
    Jan 24, 2014 at 15:08
  • But surely information in your SO profile should be relevant to how SO works? Also it appears to be your supplier that's broken, my ISP says I'm in Rochdale (Checked with Ripe and confirmed with MaxMind). Jan 24, 2014 at 15:10
  • Both my SO profile and my careers profile are set to Lancashire. Ok, I'll accept that careers is a different site, and I'll let that off, but surely my location that I SET should matter. Personally I think a downvote is a little harsh
    – user150622
    Jan 24, 2014 at 15:12
  • @MartinSteel SO profiles != Careers profiles. The job ads come from Careers. Right now we don't use profile information for targeting. It's all up to geo targeting based on IP. Although is hopefully going to change in the future.
    – Juice StaffMod
    Jan 24, 2014 at 15:12
  • @user150622 You probably got downvoted because you didn't answer the question. You should have commented on the question instead. I'm not trying to be harsh, the sames things happened to me when I started posting here.
    – Juice StaffMod
    Jan 24, 2014 at 15:14
  • Since careers knows about my SO profile, I'd just assume they'd talk to each other to put that add in context. I didn't expect it to just be based purely on IP location.
    – user150622
    Jan 24, 2014 at 15:17
  • @Juice Fair enough, I thought it was too big for a comment.
    – user150622
    Jan 24, 2014 at 15:17

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