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Wrong location using Bing

kanedaa

Casual Member
Hey,

Can anyone with Toob do a search on Bing for "my location" and let me know if it returns an accurate result?

Late yesterday afternoon I noticed it thinks I'm somewhere called Boydton in the USA. It was working fine earlier in the day, and Google and all the various IP info sites report the right UK location. I'm seeing this behaviour across multiple devices and browsers.

Thanks!
 
Don't believe everything you see on TV shows: your IP address doesn't map directly to your home location (*). Generally an ISP has one or more blocks of IP addresses, and breaks this down into pools for each of their BRASes, and if you're lucky the ISP registers the location of the pool as the physical location of the POP. But otherwise, the IP addresses are just associated with the ISP, typically their head office address.

For example, when I was on Cerberus, I used to get targeted adverts suggesting I was in Pinner. (That's roughly where Cerberus are based).

In the case of Toob, it means they've bought a block of IP addresses which originally belonged to someone in the USA. There are multiple geolocation databases, and either they haven't registered in all of them, or the sites with a problem are using old versions of those databases.

"It was working fine earlier in the day" most likely means your session was using a different public IP address at that time. Sites like ip4.me can be used to identify what IP address you are on. This can be useful when reporting problems, as you can tell Toob support what address you were on when the problem occurred (e.g. BBC not letting you view content).

(*) If the police need to map an IP address to a physical location, they raise a query with the ISP giving the date and time it was seen; the ISP then looks in their logs to see which customer was using that address at that time; and then the ISP gives the police the customer's name and address. This is not public information that Bing or anyone else on the Internet can access.
 
Sure, I get all that, I guess by 'accurate' I meant within 50 miles or so, it was just a way of asking for people to check without asking them to post their locations. Toob's Portsmouth address is exactly what I see on everything except Bing which gives a result 4000 miles in the wrong direction.

My public IP hasn't changed for days (even after power cycling) so I guess I'll flag it with Toob and see what they say.
 
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An update - I narrowed this down to some kind of IPv6 problem - or at least, it only happens with IPv6 enabled. Toob couldn't reproduce the issue and said all looks good their end, so it seems to be a Bing issue specific to me.

If I do a search for "my location" then one of the result previews shows an IP Address of 40.77.167.73 which is located in Boydton, Virginia - exactly where Bing seems to think I am - and an IP Lookup shows this is a Microsoft owned IP and various searches link this IP to Bingbot - a Bing web crawler.

I realise this is not definitive (Bing crawler hits a website, of course it displays the crawler's IP), but the coincidence is interesting, suggesting to me that since around 14th October Bing is using one of its own IP addresses to locate me, and this only happens with IPv6 enabled.

Once again, zero changes my end, all was fine for the past 5 months or so.

Trying to raise the issue with Microsoft is like shouting into a void.
 
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