[ILUG] Advertising in GMail

[Dave O'Connor]

On 11/20/06, paul at clubi.ie <paul at clubi.ie> wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Dave O Connor wrote:
>
> > Geolocation is pretty accurate these days, certainly to the city
> > level. Any web service can tell who you are to the city level
> > pretty accurately without any prior information.
>
> That's bull, sorry. I was with you on "pretty accurate", but you lost
> me with the claim in the second sentence. Geo-location might
> correlate "pretty accurate(ly)"  with end-user location across a
> large sample of addresses, however, for any given IP you just can't
> tell where the end-user is, sorry.
>

Yes, but you can make a pretty good guess. Certainly one that's mostly
accurate to the country level (and in the states, city level is also
not unusual). Yes, everyone can list exceptions (I think NTL were
using an IP range that geolocated to the UK up until recently) but for
the most part it's good enough to target ads at.

Remember we're talking about lowest common denominator here. If
everyone used eircom for DSL, geolocation here would be a lot more
accurate (they have IP ranges broken down by exchange. For example,
I'm on the naas exchange. I don't live in naas, but looking at my IP
and guessing that I'm somewhere in or around nass is not a bad guess).

   - DoC

   - DoC