Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Finding out geographic details from IP address

I am working on a web project currently where to enhance the user experience I tried to guess the user's location and do something with it. The only information I had about the user(since all of these are anonymous) was their IP address. I was looking for some services that would do the IP address lookup and tell me either the city or lat/long of the IP address.
After much googling, I came across a service provided by Geobytes which seems to suffice my requirement and looks to be quite accurate:

They also allow you to programmtically access this service. Try this link :
http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation&template=Y.txt&IpAddress=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
where Y is the response format [xml, php3, json, etc.]
and XXX... is the IP address you want to lookup

They also have few more interesting services that seem to be helpful for localizing content based on users location.

Thanks Geobytes for exposing these services.

2 comments:

Manasi said...

This is super helpful Abhinav. I was wondering about this for the longest time and trying to figure out if I can apply this to my blog to trace the anonymous comments.

Abhi said...

Manasi, you would be better off using Google Analytics!