Comment by JoshGlazebrook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshGlazebrook | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, I have been around the block trying to find a decent company that provides either a database or api for looking up a location from an ip address.

It seems like every company from MaxMind to IP2Location and all of the others are accurate for some ip addresses, and severely inaccurate for others. And I think that will only become more and more common as all of the ipv4 addresses run out and there are hundreds to thousands behind the same ip address.

I've even tried crowdsourcing from four different ip to location sources and even then, sometimes all four return different cities and even states for a single ip address.

Is there any company out there that is actually fairly accurate (on a city basis)?

I am guessing this is why companies like Google have sourced their own info.

Geo-locating by IP will always be an imperfect process because it's not actually geolocating the IP, it's geolocating the block owner.

My downtown Toronto office geo-locates as Kansas City in some cases because the org who owns the block is there. And I assume they are not keeping their records up to date as we have a /8 and I think they should be registering a sub-block or whatever it's called..

But there you go.

I would think geolocation would only get better as more people go mobile and their IP address (wifi or 3G) gets pinned to gps coordinates using location aware apps.

Think about how much info google, apple, and others can collect with this, and build a database to sell.

Yeah but those IPs are dynamic and change over time.. Unless the mobile providers (who are often national) restrict IPs to regions, you could have an IP be in one part of the country one week and in another part of the country the next, no?

You have a /8? Are you Xerox? General Electric? :)

There aren't that many /8s. You could just go through them all and see which one is "in Kansas City".

Sorry, I reasoned that wrong, I meant a /24.. :-(

Didn't mean to start a whole thing..

HP has two /8s... No idea what they're doing with >33 million IP addresses....

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