Add to that the fact the city google thinks your in isnt right, for goods sake i live in liverpool so why do i need to know whats going in manchester!

The UK is far too compact and diverse for the same local algo that might work in the states to work here.

The result is that the user experience is being badly impacted.

Shame none of the competitors are clued up enough to take advantage of this.

Of course if you live in the centre of the city that your ISP’s address puts you in, it works great. When I do searches like this I’m literally in the very centre of the map

I’m all in favour of local results – though Google look to be making review sites like Yelp redundant in certain categories (try a search for restaurants).

I have tested my data with almost all major companies (Quova, Maxmind, IP2Location etc etc) with their solutions ranging from £50 / month to £1000 / month and NO BODY has an accuracy of more than 55%!!!

This test data was for the last 30 days (recent) with more than 5000 ip addresses and postcodes(for UK).

Google, I think, is using Quova’s data (no one in google plex confirms this though – or the people I contacted didn’t know about it).

Now, there is a fundamental problem with the ISP network in UK and thats the reason why none of the companies have a solution – its not like they would not like to have more accurate data.

The culprit is the giant, monolithic beast which goes by the name of BT! Their internal networks / ISP setup is in such a way, that its impossible to get any accuracy of any kind to bind the IP addresses with a geo-location(I’ve previously done a short stint at BT).

I have had much greater accuracy of mapping IP addresses to locations (within 5 mile radius) with other ISPs(those that don’t use the BT backbone) like Virgin!

So, unless BT pull the finger out from their arse, there won’t be a solution for another 5 years or more!!

HTH