Wrong Country Detected

[stephen_wq]

All over the place, on ads, on ip resolvers, on everything that detects your country exept this page, it says i am from australia. I am from New Zealand, which may be close to Australia but is totally different. How can i somehow manage to make everything think i'm from new zealand again. I used to be able to type google.com and it would redirect to .co.nz but now it redirects to .com.au.
This is really annoying, any ideas?

[cr3ative]

Ask your ISP. They could have misconfigured something.
Otherwise, check your Localised settings on your OS.

cr3ative

[mwinter]

All over the place, on ads, on ip resolvers, on everything that detects your country exept this page, it says i am from australia. I am from New Zealand, which may be close to Australia but is totally different.

Most of the services that try to serve nationalised (rather than language-localised) content will use information that focuses around the IP address used to make a particular request[1]. This information can only be used as a guide as the IP address is not a reliable indicator of origin for various reasons.

An example here in the UK could be AOL. If you query AOL through the RIPE WHOIS database, you'll find various entries, but none of them relate directly to the UK despite the fact that AOL operate here. I don't have an IP address that I can enter, but I wouldn't be surprised if UK users shared a range assigned to AOL France, or through ARIN (the North American registry).

If your service provider is based in Australia, or may have been bought out by an Australian company, then that could explain the transformation. So could your use of a proxy server (if applicable). Try running your IP address (or that of your proxy, if you use one) through the APNIC database and try to see if the information is accurate.

Of course, there can be more to this process than simple registry look-ups; some services will have tried to gain as much information about how service providers structure their networks as possible. However, for the most part it is still based on assumptions and guess work.

Mike


[1] Browser language settings - the only thing to be transmitted regarding locality - are usually too unreliable to be used for anything other than basic language selection. Even then, you'll notice that many sites just select a default - either a native language, or English - rather than use content negotiation to serve a localised set of resources.

[stephen_wq]

The IP locator still says i'm australian, but now google is redirecting to .co.nz thanks to the language change.
That database detects our ip to to be ihug new zealand, which it is, but every other locator thinks its australian. I'll ring the ISP some time, thanks for everyones help.