[stagas]

Oh wow, they're actually doing the same thing, triangulating on latency. Hive mind, I guess. I used universities because I figured a)they won't mind, and b)they're more likely to have their servers on premises, then used a public reverse geoip to get their locations. I'll try to see if I can integrate with Vercel's edge network, seems more ideal.

Edit: no, I misunderstood, the location dot that's being displayed isn't the product of triangulation, they're just doing reverse geoip lookup. So, I wonder now if the edge network would perform better.

Update: it doesn't perform better. Either there is some kind of proxy redirecting their traffic or these servers aren't where they say they are, the center is skewed out completely. The universities win so far being correct and accurate most of the time.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Unimpressed with yours. Why? Because my ISP got some IPv4 space recently, which was formerly allocated to .ua, .ru, .iq, & .ir. While being physically next to or in Hamburg, .de. That led to all sorts of inconveniences for some people, suddenly barred from logging on, or using the sites they frequent, because they used outdated geo-ip data. I didn't even notice, except for the outrage in their customer forum.

Now yours consistently puts me somewhere into, or onto the shores of the Black Sea, while Vercels doesn't. So that makes me suspicious of your claim by using latency alone.

Edit: There seems to be outdated geo-ip information factored in somewhere. Why else it would put me IN the Black Sea?

[stagas]

I mentioned I just started working on it. To try for yourself you'd need to clone and tweak the servers list to find an optimal arrangement for you. The problem as I see it is that jumping continents occurs really artificial delays which skews the result significantly, so it first needs to identify your relative whereabouts, then decide on an optimal set of servers. If you clone and tweak the servers to place yourself inside the polygon you'd see it does locate you. Vercel is doing a reverse geoip lookup, so your location is preconfigured in some database based on your ip.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

At least they are current ;-)

[gregoryl]

I hope you can come back in a day or so, and re-read this conversation. You're not being very nice, or fair, and it doesn't portray you in a good light.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I probably will. It may have come across harsh, but wasn't intended as such. IMO i outlined the reasons why sufficiently in my post and edit.

[stagas]

Maybe you misunderstood what the tool is doing. It is not doing geoip, it is using the latency of pings between your client and some selected servers with known locations, then calculates the center based on those timings and these known locations. Very simple, you can look at the code and see what it's doing. It's not factoring in any kind of real latency, such as the speed of light, hop delays, etc. Unfortunately, as others pointed out, this method works poorly, especially in such long distances. In my tests you can only find a certain window that performs well for your location, still within a radius of hundreds or thousands of kms, which makes it pretty unusable as you point out. Knowing what _doesn't_ work is also valuable information.