Internet search giant Google has just introduced an enhancement to its local map search results. The new feature means that when you search Google the system will guess where you are and show results near you. The problem is that to determine your location Google will analyse the Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned to you by your ISP when you connect to the Internet, which can be very inaccurate.

The change works fine if you’re logged into a Google account containing your location, but for those without one Google will fall back on your connections IP instead. Unfortunately what Google has failed to understand is that IP’s allocated from an ISP are done so by servers that aren’t usually local to the broadband user (you).

For example, this morning we were visiting an office in Southampton and wanted to do a quick search for restaurants. Normally, since we had UK selected, it would give a rough set of results for the whole country until we put in something akin to Southampton restaurants. However our ISP is based in Bristol, thus a simple search for restaurants returned this:


The test above isn't too troubling because you can easily click 'change location' or add a town into the search name as per our earlier example. Restaurants are after all a location specific product, but many UK businesses and websites are not.

Many users are now finding the new search results to be less relevant to their needs and not more. The situation is made worse by the fact that a lot of UK broadband ISPs operate from London, thus causing a great deal of UK searches to return results that give websites in the capital city a priority over everybody else. Good for some, bad for most.