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Q
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In some cases CountryHawk is returning "US" for the country of AOL users, when indeed these users are in other countries such as Germany and France. Why is this and how can I account for this?
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A
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Because of the way AOL uses proxies, there will be cases where visitors in other countries using AOL will be detected as "US". There are, however, some effective ways you can detect this situation.
First, you can use CountryHawk in conjunction with BrowserHawk to detect if the user is on AOL. This way you can use logic so that if CountryHawk detects the country as "US", but BrowserHawk says the user is on AOL, then you may want to treat CountryHawk's answer with less confidence for that visitor.
Likewise you can also use BrowserHawk to detect the visitor's time zone difference between your server and their browser. If your server is based in the US, then you use logic so that if they are more than 3 hours ahead, but CountryHawk is saying they are in the US and BrowserHawk is saying they are on AOL, then you can be fairly confident that the user is not actually in the US.
If your server is based outside the US, then you can use similar logic - if their time zone difference is less than 3 hours behind but CountryHawk is saying they are in the US and BrowserHawk is saying they are on AOL, then you can be fairly confident that the user is not actually in the US.
As much as we'd like CountryHawk to be 100% perfect, unfortunately country detection is not an exact science mainly due to the AOL proxy issue. But when used in conjunction with BH and these other tests mentioned, this should provide a finer degree of accuracy or at least enable you to detect the rare situations where CountryHawk has not provided a correct answer.
Overall we have found (both from our own testing and customer feedback) that CountryHawk is 98% accurate, plus or minus about 1%, and that this level of accuracy is very well acceptable to our customers.
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