IP Address Geolocation Javascript API : JSON Response | Hacker News Reader

IP Address Geolocation Javascript API : JSON Response

nitinh.com

62 pointstheone13 comments

Well, it gets my country correctly :)

Wonder how it fares in different countries (For me, it shows me as London, UK whereas I'm actually a hundred or so miles outside London).

For me it is working very fine. Bombay, India

Well, it's going to give location of your IP, not your body (or even your CPU). I, for example, am in the middle of a cow paddy. But correctly offers the name of the town where my IP is based (not the city to which my body is geographically closer). Such are the relativities of "locating" a person according to IP.

this is what the name suggest "IP Address Geolocation"

Right. I'm just pointing out that it's not really all that useful to know where someones ISP is based, if it's hundreds of miles away from them.

doesn't even show location of microsoft.com IP correctly

Quick comment but a disclaimer first - I have a prejudice on this subject since I founded Digital Envoy which was the first IP geotargeting company. I no longer work there and the company was acquired back in 2007.

In general services that are on the cheaper end or free end of the spectrum rely heavily on whois data parsing and analysis. This is a highly inaccurate method of targeting. Companies that are specifically seeking to provide high quality and highly accurate data, like Digital Envoy, do a lot more analysis than just parsing public information. That said, the service is a lot more expensive than these cheap/free service. In the end, you get what you pay for. A lot of people start on these services and then graduate to more expensive services as their needs for accuracy increase.

May be you are correct, but I am pretty sure that in this opensource world soon there will be a good free option available

ya you(yourock) are 100% correct, even same way i believe ...in upcoming days we will surly get a better free option.

Honestly, it doesn't really matter to me since I've already had my exit from my company but unfortunately I don't think this is true. Given how much data collection and analysis has to go into good IP geotargeting technology, this really is something that a for-profit company has to do. Otherwise at some point in the last 10 years that Digital Envoy has been around, the company would have been crushed by an open source or cheaper alternative. That isn't true and this is the main reason why, IMHO.

I imagine skyhook should have enormous leverage here. They business is normally the opposite, but it's foolish for them not to use their databases in the reverse. Same applies to large skyhok users such as Google and Apple, as they should have access to all of the same data.

Next, there is Amazon - they know where you live and they know your IP address. Everybody shops at Amazon.

Now, I can't think of an open & free way to collect exact information yet... ideas?

Good ideas but there are issues with this approach. But to explain them here would probably cause me to run out of characters and bore 99% of HN readers. But you're absolutely right that some of these sources could help augment the accuracy of any IP geotargeting system. Unfortunately this type of data has been hard to get a hold of because of either privacy policy issues or some strange beliefe that this was proprietary/trade secret information.

Trust me, I've tried this in the past and came up empty most of the time. That said, it is a really good idea.

Being good and doing good in market doesn't mean everything. If you say so, Linux wouldn't have been developed, as MS, apple has already been in the market and doing great.

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