I have to make a restaurant home delivery website, and the owners do not wish to deliver more than 6km away. I hear that the geoIP DB 'Maxmind GeoLite city' is not particularly accurate though. Furthermore if you know of a database that has a shortcode, or predefined query for obtaining the distance without loads of coding, I would love to hear about it! I hope the question is well defined enough. All advice welcome!
I don't know the specification of your project, but it's likely you do know the delivery address. In this case you could use Google's Geocoding APIs to get the position (lat,lng) and then calculate the distance.
Of course there are limitations in the amount of daily requests, but I hardly think your app will reach that limit.
Take a look here:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding
As far as I know, there are no free IP geolocation databases that will reliably provide the accuracy you are looking for, especially if your client has visitors using mobile devices.
I would recommend that you take a look at W3C Geolocation JavaScript API. The results from this will often be more accurate than IP geolocation, especially if the user is on a device with GPS. Do note that it will pop up a dialog asking the user whether they want to share their location with your site.
HTML5 geo location if far more accurate than IP address based location.
http://ipgeo5.com/
Related
Because anyone could fake their geolocation lat/long number to the app by various means. Are there any cheap and practical solution or service we could ensure that they have really stay in the same place as the geolocation they sent?
Maybe approximation from IP Address or something like that. I just think about geolocation game like Pokemon GO that should require people to really travel to specific location
I want to be able to run queries locally comparing latitude and longitude of locations so I can run queries for certain addresses I've captured based on distance.
I found a free database that has this information for zip codes but I want this information for more specific addresses. I've looked at google's geolocation service and it appears it's against the TOS to store these values in my database or to use them for anything other than doing stuff with google maps. (If somebody's looked deeper into this and I'm incorrect let me know)
Am I likely to find any (free or pay) service that will let me store these lat/lon values locally? The number of addresses I need is currently pretty small but if my site becomes popular it could expand quite a bit over time to a large number. I just need to get the coordinates of each address entered once though.
This question hasn't received enough attention...
You're correct -- it can't be done with Google's service and still conform to the TOS. Cheers to you for honestly seeking to comply with the TOS.
I work at a company called SmartyStreets where we process addresses and verify addresses -- and geocode them, too. Google's terms don't allow you to store the data returned from the API, and there's pretty strict usage limits before they throttle or cut off your access.
Screen scraping presents many challenges and problems which are both technical and ethical, and I don't suppose I'll get into them here. The Microsoft library linked to by Giorgio is for .NET only.
If you're still serious about doing this, we have a service called LiveAddress which is accessible from any platform or language. It's a RESTful API which can be called using GET or POST for example, and the output is JSON which is easy to parse in pretty much every common language/platform.
Our terms allow you to store the data you collect as long as you don't re-manufacture our product or build your own database in an attempt to duplicate ours (or something of the like). For what you've described, though, it shouldn't be a problem.
Let me know if you have further questions about address geocoding; I'll be happy to help.
By the way, there's some sample code at our GitHub repo: https://github.com/smartystreets/LiveAddressSamples
http://www.zip-info.com/cgi-local/zipsrch.exe?ll=ll&zip=13206&Go=Go could use a screen scraper if you just need to get them once.
Also Microsoft provides this service. Check if this can help you http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966913.aspx
I'm working on a project that returns information based on the user's location. I also want to display the user's town in text (no map) so they can change it if it's not accurate.
If things go well I hope this will be more than a small experiment, so can anyone recommend a good reverse geocoding service with the least restrictions? I notice that Google/Yahoo have a limit to the number of daily queries along with other usage terms. I basically need to take latitude and longitude and convert them to a city/town (which I presume cannot be done using the HTML5 Geolocation API).
Geocoda just launched a geocoding and spatial database service and offers up to 1K queries a month free, with paid plans starting at $49 for 25,000 queries/month. SimpleGeo just closed their Context API so you may want to look at Geocoda or other alternatives.
You're correct, the browser geolocation API only provides coordinates.
I use SimpleGeo a lot and recommend them. They offer 10K queries a day free then 0.25USD per 1K calls after that. Their Context API is what you're going to want, it pretty much does what is says on the tin. Works server-side and client-side (without requiring you to draw a map, like Google.)
GeoNames can also do this and allows up to 30K "credits" a day, different queries expend different credit amounts. The free service has highly variable performance, the paid service is more consistent. I've used them in the past, but don't much anymore because of the difficulty of automatically dealing with their data, which is more "pure" but less meaningful to most people.
I'd like to get a stronger idea of how websites like http://www.msn.com/ can detect where you are. I know that you can do this by IP, but that can be extremely inaccurate depending on your ISP.
What is the most accurate method of doing this on the web?
The ways you can do this, in descending order of accuracy:
Geolocation API (requires user to have compatible browser and give explicit permission)
Profiling data from advertising network.
IP Geolocation (Free versions tend to be very inaccurate, you can pay for slightly more accurate data)
User entered data.
I am working on integrating geolocation services into a website and the best source of data I've found so far is MaxMind's GeoIP API with GeoLite City data. Even this data seems to often be questionable though. For example, I am located in downtown Palo Alto, but it locates my IP as being in Portola Valley, which is about 7 miles away. Palo Alto has a population of 60k+, whereas Portola Valley has a population of less than 5k. I would think if you see an IP originating somewhere around there it would make more sense to assume it was coming from the highly populated city, not the tiny one. I've also had it locate Palo Alto IPs completely across the country in Kentucky, etc.
Does anyone know of any better sources of data, or any tools/technologies/efforts to improve the accuracy of geolocation efforts? Commercial solutions are fine.
Where an IP comes up at the wrong end of the country, you probably won't find a better match elsewhere because it's probably an ISP that uses one group of IPs for customers in a wide area. My favourite example is trains here in the UK where the on-board wifi is identified as being in Sweden because they use a satellite connection to an ISP in Sweden.
A commercial supplier may be able to afford to spend more time tracking down the hard cases, but in many cases there just won't be a good answer to give you. They may, however, give you a confidence factor to tell you when they're guessing. I've heard good things about Quova, though I've never used them.
Assuming that you've got the best latitude and longitude that you can get (or can afford), then you're left dealing with cases where they pick the closest city rather than a more likely larger city nearby. Unfortunately I don't have the code to hand, but I had some success using the data from geonames to pick a "sensible" city near a point. They list lat/long and population, so you can do something like
ORDER BY ( Distance / LOG( Population ) )
You'd need to experiment with that to get something with the right level of bias towards larger cities, but I had it working quite nicely taking the centre of a Google Maps view and displaying a heading like "Showing results near London..." that changed as you moved the map.
I am not sure if this will help, but here is a site that has done a pretty good job of IP mapping. Maybe you could ask them for help :) seomoz.org
A couple of sites I saw referenced recently for free GeoIP services are
WIPmania
hostip.info