On 04/01/2013 07:33 PM, Charlie DeTar wrote:
On 04/01/2013 10:12 PM, Alex Mandel wrote:
On 04/01/2013 07:00 PM, Catherine D'Ignazio wrote:
Hello and apologies for any cross-posting!
Does anyone know of a good, ideally free and open source, API for
getting a user's geography (or closest approximation) from their IP
address?
Thanks,
Catherine
Maxmind offers a free version of their database GeoIP (for download
and local use). Their web api is free for 25 hits a day.
If you want more hits, or a better more up to date database that you
can run locally then you pay.
I use their free GeoIP and GeoIP with my Awstats (web log analyzer)
all the time.
http://www.maxmind.com/en/geolocation_landing
Thanks,
Alex
If you're using interactive web browsers, there's a W3C standard for
that: http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html . You can access it
using navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(callback). Under the
hood, different browsers in different contexts might use IP addresses,
wifi access point fingerprinting, GPS, or whatever else is available.
An example:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Using_geolocation#Geolocation_Example
The upside of this: it's a standard, not tied to a single provider, can
be more precise than just IP.
The downside: unpredictable support, and requires prompting the user for
permission, and only works interactively in web browsers.
Google also has a service; but limited to 100 free requests per day:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/business/geolocation/
-charlie
Just came across this one, which is crowdsourced
http://www.hostip.info/
Enjoy,
Alex
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