Ask YC: Geolocation by IP Address API/Service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Geolocation by IP Address API/Service?

21 pointsentelarust21 comments

Does anyone have any experience with good geolocation by ip address services (payfor or free) with solid APIs?

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.

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

>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.

It really isn't just AOL. I live in east Alabama, and geolocation of my IP almost always puts me in a suburb of Atlanta (except for the few that put me in Miami... not sure what's up with that) because I use an AT&T (Bellsouth) DSL line.

I'm using hostip.info for my small project http://newshoured.com/ and it seems to work for nearly everyone I've asked. It's also got a dead simple API. Note: the population of people I've asked is < 20, and it did fail the iPhone test, which I assumed it would.

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.

I've used http://www.maxmind.com/ They have a free older database of IPs you can download (usually a month out of date - -but good enough for stuff I've needed)

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

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

I've been quite happy wit hteh geolite city database: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

updating monthly is a bit of a pain, but no real complaints. i'd recommend using mod_geoip since it's written in c

also I use the binary format of the database as recommended by maxmind, but one cool thing i was able to do with the the csv version was import it into my db and then use sphinx to build a full text searchable index of worldwide cities

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?

Paste it in this thread, maybe? ;-D

Yeah I was at work and I needed to dig into some old files to find it, here we go:

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

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...

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 :(

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

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

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com