> And don't even get me started on the people searching behind a corporate firewall, where the corporate headquarters (and IT dept) were halfway across the US.
Or, indeed, in a different country with a different native language. I worked for one of those for a while, in a job that involved a fair bit of official web browsing (on-line reference materials for various things). Within days of the shift to routing everything through corporate IT, I wanted to kill whoever invented IP geolocation. It's a great idea that should almost never be used in practice.
No matter how many times I change the language on the PayPal page, I get Italian the next time. Just because Tiscali assigned me an IP from "Italian" pool... in UK. IP geolocation can be annoying.
Strangely - porn banners still show correct city in UK, not Italy... maybe PayPal should buy the geo DB from them instead?
So how would you do it? I notice you didn't write "IP geolocation", just "geolocation", so perhaps you would use something other than the IP information?
It is clear that no matter how smart you are as a developer, IP-only geolocation can't work reliably, simply because of the proxy issue.
It's more a UI/UX issue. You want to make it clear that the guessed location is only a suggestion so people don't get confused if it's wrong. You also want to make it just as easy to change it (if it's wrong) as if you weren't providing the location suggestion at all. Difficult? Maybe. But not impossible.
And really, it's just balance -- maybe some people will still get confused. But maybe the benefit gained by the people who get their location guessed correctly outweighs the detriment of those who get a bad guess and get confused.
Or, indeed, in a different country with a different native language. I worked for one of those for a while, in a job that involved a fair bit of official web browsing (on-line reference materials for various things). Within days of the shift to routing everything through corporate IT, I wanted to kill whoever invented IP geolocation. It's a great idea that should almost never be used in practice.