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Possible Duplicate:
Location change in my user profile

So I never set a location in my profile, but I recently saw that StackExchange was smart enough to set it for me. It decided that my location was

    Soesterberg, Netherlands

which is pretty impressive... except for the fast that I've never been within 300 km of Soesterberg in my life. Further, this seems to be added to each new SE site I join. Any idea why this happens?

I tagged this but even if this behavior generalizes I doubt it would be a high priority to fix. Still, it seems odd enough to warrant discussion.

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    $\begingroup$ I don't understand the algorithm they're using to decide these things... just change it back manually and hope for the best, I suppose. $\endgroup$
    – Zev Chonoles Mod
    Commented Sep 7, 2011 at 2:51
  • $\begingroup$ @zev it's explained in the post, it is a Yahoo Geolocation API that attempts to parse anything a human being can type in a field to a location. There was a one-time fixup we did to try to match things, but if you put gibberish in there, the results can be strange. $\endgroup$
    – Jeff Atwood Mod
    Commented Sep 7, 2011 at 6:09

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