This is a funny one. InfoWorld reports a network infrastructure manager for a school district in Texas who manages 9,000 employees and 64,000 students recently changed the IP block they use to a new IP block. Since that change, anyone using Google within that IP block would be sent to Google Canada.
Google Canada does slightly skew their results to more Canadian based sites, and this was a “minor annoyance” for searchers but a nightmare for the network infrastructure manager’s team who had to deal with all the calls about this from the readers.
He said he “checked with ARIN (The American Registry of Internet Numbers) and learned that our new IP block was used by an organization from Alberta, Canada until mid-2005. Apparently Google’s redirection tables are very stale.”
After trying countless ways to contact Google, he is afraid the only way to be heard is to have his attorney draft a “certified letter” to Google.
I wish they would of searched on Google for the [Best Way To Contact Google?]. Maybe they would of found my article at the Search Engine Roundtable named Best Way To Contact Google?
Related Topics: Google: Critics
Maybe your article didn’t rank in Google.ca? ;-)
mad4, that made me laugh. I was actually thinking that when I wrote this. ;-)
I’ll check on this.
Just fyi, here’s the link in our documentation about how to report a bad IP geolocation:
http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=873
The timeframe is typically a few weeks, I believe.
Thanks Matt.
A simple Google Groups post would have had a Googler send this guy this info.