

Ask YC: Geolocation by IP Address API/Service? - entelarust

Does anyone have any experience with good geolocation by ip address services (payfor or free) with solid APIs?
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sanj
None of them are very good, at least partly because things are so aggregated
through ISPs. For instance, ALL AOL users appear to be in Herndon (?), VA

However:

<http://www.hostip.info/>

is a free service that relies on its users putting their own data in. A wiki
like mechanism, if you will.

<http://www.geody.com/geoip.php>

appears to work, but I'd worry about their TOS.

<http://www.maxmind.com/app/locate_ip>

is one that I used (at least in demo mode), and it is much better than most.
But it isn't cheap.

There are more folks out there -- they end up being used by fraud-prevention
outfits by filtering out IPs from places with known credit card abuse issues.

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cstejerean
I think we can safely assume AOL is no longer an issue. Anyone still using AOL
dialup?

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nickb
>Anyone still using AOL dialup?

You'd be amazed how many people in US are still on AOL. They all use IE and
some of them are still on 56K modems.

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sanjayparekh
I'm a little late to the party but I'm a co-founder of Digital Envoy
(www.digitalenvoy.net). The company was acquired last year (Landmark
Communications) but we invented the field of IP location technology back in
1999. The company's technology is generally considered the best available and
has shown to be more accurate in head-to-head competitions. Of course, it
isn't free but it isn't ridiculously expensive. Performance on Digital Envoy's
stuff beats anyone else out there (hence the great customer list). Not sure
why I keep selling for them since I no longer work there so for what it's
worth, take a look.

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Malcx
I've used <http://www.maxmind.com/> They have a free older database of IPs you
can download (usually a month out of date - -but good enough for stuff I've
needed)

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sanj
I believe the free version doesn't go 'inside' ISPs' subnets like the pay
version does. That's pretty limiting.

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axod
Depends. Quite often you just need the country and that's enough.

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nextmoveone
Maxmind has a free javascript one to detect cities and states...the cities are
a little off but the state is always dead on.

I can provide it later if you'd like?

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randallsquared
I just tried Maxmind, and it thinks I'm in Roswell, GA. I'm in east Alabama.

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nextmoveone
Hey give the one up there a try. It should get your state right, I've never
had any problems with it, although my testing has been limited to 12 trials...

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NoBSWebDesign
I tried the built-in ip address geocoding in the Rails plugin, GeoKit.

It's relatively accurate except for when the visitor is accessing the site
from a corporate or school network, in which case it shows up where their main
ISP hub is, which could be across the US. Unfortunately that's a large
percentage of our users, so it just ended up confusing most of them. We had to
remove that feature :(

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gsiener
I'm unclear on if FireEagle will provide this service. Any ideas?

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modoc
Akamai has an amazing one, but it's not cheap

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earle
Yeah, Akamai is the best. We do an awful lot of geocoding related functions on
Groovr, and have looked at more or less all the available IP geocoding
databases. Akamai's the best.

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dedalus
Totally Agree! Akamai not only gives you geolocation but thier bandwidth as
well, so you can serve different content to a dial-up user versus that of a
high broadband user

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schammy
Maxmind is good, we use 3 of their products on getclicky.com. They all have
straight forward APIs, and are very easy to setup and use within your own
application.

GeoIPCity - returns city, country, "region" (state in the US), lat/long, area
code, zip code, and more. This is available for free, or ~$400 for the full
version, which is considerably more accurate, within the US at least. The free
version is still pretty damn good considering it's free. The paid version is
updated weekly, free is monthly.

We also use the "organization" and "hostname" products, which tell us for
example that someone is from "Comcast Cable" and their hostname is
"comcast.net", or "Google Inc" and "google.com", etc. These products are not
available for free but they are pretty cheap ($15 for the hostname and $80 for
the organization I think).

They're not 100% accurate, but you won't find a product that is. We are very
happy with them and highly recommend them.

