It's not extremely precise, but is enough for applications like this.
Notice for instance the point up north in Canada, a lot of IPs will be placed there. It's in the middle of Manitoba, and there's pretty much nothing there. I believe it's the geographical center of Canada, and the default value when no other coordinates are known.
That's pretty much exactly what's happening with some locations. We do our best to get an accurate location based on a few sources, but ultimately Maxmind is the database we fall back to for pure IP based location if that's all we have.
We have the same difficulties with our Maxmind IP database. An inordinate number of our users supposedly live in Potwin, KS, AKA the geographical center of the United States.
It's not extremely precise, but is enough for applications like this. Notice for instance the point up north in Canada, a lot of IPs will be placed there. It's in the middle of Manitoba, and there's pretty much nothing there. I believe it's the geographical center of Canada, and the default value when no other coordinates are known.