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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

So browsing nginx logs for my vanity domain and running whois queries for the IPs at 3am is not nearly as weird as I thought.

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On that note, how exactly are they reaching conclusions on where Googlers who are Googling you actually work? (i.e. their actual company name, not just the physical location their IP address maps to).

I second this question. What are the best databases out there, that map IP addresses of office space, not web servers, to company names?

I see some products out there that purport to do this, but they aren't saying where they're getting their data. I'm really curious how they are creating such a database.

LinkedIn, for example, would have such a db, since people surf LinkedIn from work. However, they're not granting access to it, I'm sure.

Who else could generate a strong database like this?

We used a company called LeadLander for this when we were in the B2B space. Since qualifying leads and negotiating a deal were harder than lead identification for us, this was mostly a vanity / fun project, although it was successful in motivating us.

There are actually a lot of different databases that match IP addresses to companies, university's etc. For example, Max Mind GEOIP has some of that info. The trick was just compiling those different sources into a more reliable custom database. We still have a lot of work to do to continue to improve that database

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