wanna help me test something?
 

So I downloaded the freeware GeoIP database in csv format and put together a little app:

http://sandbox.jeremymorgan.com/geo/location.php

Type in your actual city, and we'll see how accurate it is. I'm testing the accuracy of this database, and see if it's usable.

In exchange, I'll share my findings/code to GFY members, in case you want to implement this on your site.

You can view the results here:

http://sandbox.jeremymorgan.com/geo/location.php?mode=show

nice Jeremy, i'll be interested in this down the road

Hello user from , WA

Your IP is 71.231.250.135

What is this?

This is just a silly program to try and guess what city you are coming from based on your IP address. This is based on an open source database called geoIP, you can download a binary, or a csv file like I did, and drop it into a database.


User says:

GEOIP says:
university place

, WA
Guttenberg, IA

Dubuque, IA
orlando

Orlando, FL
kerman,ca

Stockton, CA
Wilsonville, OR

Beaverton, OR

Cool, I downloaded the csv, and dumped it into a mysql database, there is a shitload of records. Even on my local webserver (no load whatsoever) queries take around 5 seconds, so I'm guessing using their binary version is faster. I tried indexing the tables and optimizing things, but it hasn't done much.

I plan on optimizing it, and maybe coming up with a US-only database to hit. I'll share my code in this thread, with a small class to extract data, it's pretty simple.

I know it won't be totally accurate, they disclose that on their site, the free version is much less accurate than paid, but if it's in the close vicinity, I don't see why we couldn't use it, if anything just to attact the user's attention, or maybe even to do some demographic study for your paysite members. I'll keep everyone posted in this thread with whatever I come up with.

I didn't get it.

Fuzzy.

http://www.archiviokubrick.it/biblio...mparison_3.jpg

2hp

User says: Montreal, QC, Canada

GEOIP says:

Whitby, ON
Ontario

Salt Lake City, UT
san francisco

Greenville, SC
bhubaneswar

New Delhi, 07
oak forest

Hinsdale, IL
Lumby, Canada

,
Buenos Aires, Argentina

,
Fucknugget, Kentucky

Stockton, CA
Montreal, Canada

Montréal, QC
Austria

,
university place

, WA
Guttenberg, IA

Dubuque, IA
orlando

Orlando, FL
kerman,ca

Stockton, CA
Wilsonville, OR

Beaverton, OR

Ok, I definitely don't get this one.

I live in South Africa, your script didn't say shit ;)

so much about free geoip database, saw another one - Czech Republic - the same story, is it only for the US?

No, it's supposedly worldwide. I did see a few non-us entries in there so far. As far as SA goes, not sure which cities/provinces/countries it includes, but I'll do a query on it later and find out.

As it turns out, the accuracy of this is not great.

However, I dont know if the extra accuracy is even worth it anyway. Some people have ISP routers that are 20-30 miles away anyway, so the extra accuracy may not be worth it.

I ended up downloading the binary version and working against it, it is substantially faster. Using their API, I was able to get results 1/10th of the time the database version is.

So I would highly reccomend just using that version instead, and forget the DB version. At least in my case, it was very very slow on a production machine.