This morning Search Engine Land has a lengthy and informative article about geolocation–how it works, what it is used for, who offers it and who deploys it. The sentence in the article that sums it up for Umibot is this one:

The biggest problem in assessing the error rates of geolocation data is the simple fact that there’s no way to really test well for accuracy.

As the article indicates, this uncertainty has to do with proxy servers, load balancers and anonymized traffic. Urban Mapping’s georargeting solution (not yet unveiled, but in the latter stages of testing) will provide significant gains over existing geolocation technologies using a completely different technique–rather than identifying the location of an IP address, UMI sees to determine the intent of users, and tie that data to geographic space. A hard concept to understand, yes, but the results will speak for themselves. We’re excited to make this available and making some final tweaks, so the coming weeks should have some more news in store.