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I was just on the front page of Stack Overflow Careers and noticed the section under "featured jobs". Seeing Philadelphia as "near Brooklyn" was a bit startling, so I reasoned that some error has been made.

Please forgive the typo.

The front page

Looking into the proximity search under job listings, I learned that Exton, PA is less than 20 miles from my home in NJ. This is especially surprising as I live in Northern NJ, and Exton, PA is barely within 20 miles of this side of the Delaware and south of Camden!

I will admit, Bridgewater is not terribly further than Plainview, but I have never been to Plainview while I have been to Bridgewater. Despite the fact that it is technically less than 50 miles to Bridgewater, I don't think that such a trip would be anything less than torture for a daily commute.

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    Playing devils advocate here. As the crow flies, most these locations are within 80 miles of each other. In some parts of the United States, that is a commutable distance or where telecommuting could be an option. It is also within a distance where if the job is perfect, a move wouldn't be insane to consider.
    – Steven V
    Oct 27, 2014 at 19:13
  • It's because I'm not thinking forth-dimensionally.
    – cwallenpoole
    Oct 27, 2014 at 19:14
  • @StevenV I just checked on the job search page. Setting a radius of 20 miles from Vernon, NJ gave me a job in Exton, PA and Philly.
    – cwallenpoole
    Oct 27, 2014 at 19:15
  • Ah, didn't see your edit before posting the comment. I'll agree that's... odd.
    – Steven V
    Oct 27, 2014 at 19:19
  • @cwallenpoole can you send the exact URL for your search to [email protected]? I'm having trouble reproducing your results. Or link it here, whatever your preference.
    – Dean Ward
    Oct 28, 2014 at 19:22
  • careers.stackoverflow.com/…
    – cwallenpoole
    Oct 29, 2014 at 16:20

2 Answers 2

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There are a few things here:

  1. (Based on your edit) We use IP to determine location. Sometimes this mapping is not exact and your location as we see it can be several miles from your actual location. That doesn't mean we don't have a bug (which we'll look into) but that it can sometimes be inexact based on where your IP leads us.
  2. The idea behind "jobs near" is to show jobs in terms of commutable distance. This is defined as within 10, 30, or 60 miles of your location. In certain extreme cases where there are not many jobs in a 60 mile radius we'll extend it up to 100, but that should not be happening in Brooklyn.

So, this could be us getting a bad idea of where you are based on your IP or there is a real bug. We'll figure out which it is and post an update.

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  • The search should not have been based on IP. I had entered my zip code (for Vernon, NJ) and set the range to 20 miles. I got Philly. Fourth-dimensionality.
    – cwallenpoole
    Oct 28, 2014 at 3:47
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We pushed a build that finds jobs within 10, 30, 60, 100 miles of your current location on the home page. Previously it was only doing jobs within 100 miles. It'll try each distance in ascending order until it finds enough jobs to populate the list on the home page. This makes it consistent with the way we do ads elsewhere on the site. Brooklyn now tends to return results only in New York, NY.

Having a hard time reproducing your second issue with proximity search though. If you can comment or email [email protected] with the URL the search resulted in then we'll try to get to the bottom of it.

UPDATE

We use Google to provide our geo-coding and it takes the ZIP code 07422 and translates it to all of New Jersey. This would explain the reason you're getting results that are more than 20 miles away from where you actually are. You can see where we actually geo-coded to from the title just above the results:

Job Search Results - Proximity to 07422

Using Vernon, NJ gives me 2 results:

Job Search Results - Proximity to Vernon, NJ

Let us know if this doesn't match with what you're seeing.

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