Where You At? (Predict Location)

When users visit yellowpages.com, we present them with a search form that asks them to tell us not just what they’re looking for, but where they want us to search for it.

However, not all search queries arrive at our servers in such neat and tidy packages. In some cases, queries arrive as an undifferentiated jumble of terms that may contain both types of information. If we’re lucky, we can identify and use any geographical information embedded in the text. Other times, the queries simply don’t contain geographic information that we can extract—they’re all what but no where.

In those cases, all we’ve got to go on is the IP address of the user’s computer—which isn’t great, but it’s certainly better than nothing! So we have deployed a new feature that takes the users’s IP address, then looks it up in a database of known IP addresses to find the real-world location associated with that address. It’s not foolproof, and it’s not exhaustive, but in many cases it does a fairly good job of identifying a user’s location.

If you’re curious, you can try this out now—go ahead, see if we can guess where you’re sitting. (And let us know how we did in the comments!)