Can anyone provide a suggestion for a highly accurate GeoIP service that can locate a user down to the city?
Currently I am using MaxMind GeoLite but it is only 78% accurate. Even their premium is only 80%.
I was hoping to find something greater then 90% accurate at city look up based on IP.
Thanks.
I've been looking into this myself, but since there are so many that I could only recommend you to take a look at this lengthy blog post:
https://medium.com/#ipdata_co/what-is-the-best-commercial-ip-geolocation-api-d8195cda7027
It's from one provider, but they compare other offers.
Related
Just wanted to ask. I am working on this transportation app, it's operational already. Unfortunately, there are some cases where unique addresses are only recorded as geographical coordinates, which it can't be read as normal addresses.
The goal is to read this address and have targeted ads/campaigns on which places are the most popular or crowded.
Just wanted to ask, what's the best approach to do this? Is it via API? Java? or what's the best way?
Any help is appreciated!
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/
I am trying to build an iphone app that finds the location with business name.
For example, I want to annotate a restaurant and I want to find it with the name of restaurant. I was trying to use CLGeocoder, but it seems like geocoder does not help in this case. I am not sure what to do.. can anyone give me a hint about this?
Thank you
Google maps will take a business name and return location(s). It sounds like a webservice is what you're needing, you'll just have to think through the inputs, the outputs, and figure out how it all logically fits into your app.
"Business name" is info independent of the address and not available to CLGeocoder. For this you have to use an external service where business names are actually registered. I would suggest the Google Places API, but the search results will still be limited to those businesses registered to Google.
And yes, you will have to dirty your hands with "NSURL stuff", and process the results with "NSJSONSerialization stuff".
If you're happy to consider an SDK-based solution, Huq Industries offer exactly this as part of their Real-world Analytics platform. They've done a lot to address the problem of reliably relating device location to physical businesses accurately by combining location with other data including WiFi. You can get business events by business name, category and address.
Coverage is pretty global and it's mostly free. Check out the SDK repo on GitHub.
Disclaimer: I contributed to this.
Is there a good physical address to GeoLocation conversion database in the UK? I am trying to use this to build a globrix style search box http://www.globrix.com/ for a web application. Any pointers will be nice. I have been searching for hours. I have found several that convert UK Postcodes into Geolocation. But I need the addresses listed as on Globrix.
The Google Maps API provides a geocoder webservice that you can actually use independently of Google Maps itself. You send it the address/postcode, and it responds with a lat/long plus disambiguated addresses. We use it server-side in the UK to do address lookup. It's incredibly quick, too.
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/index.html
http://www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk should be able to help with this. Alternatively, you can buy the "PAF" (Postcode Address File) from the Royal Mail, but it is expensive.
Update for information relating UK geolocations in 2020. Since 2009:
Google's Geocoder has gotten an order of magnitude more expensive in 2018. It's ~0.5c per search with no free tier
Office for National Statistics have released a free postcode directory called ONSPD. This means if you have the postcode of your address, you can resolve a geolocation accurate to the postcode centroid (this may be 10-100m or so out). There's a free public service API available at https://postcodes.io which allows you to forward or reverse geocode a postcode. There are also public docker data and application images which allow you to host this easily
If you're interested in Rooftop accurate geocodes, a change in Ordnance Survey licensing in 2020 has meant its much simpler and cheaper to access geolocations for almost every premise in Great Britain from Ordnance Survey by combining it with Royal Mail PAF (Postcode Address File). As of September 2020, I think https://ideal-postcodes.co.uk is currently the only company to offer complete and authoritative rooftop geolocations under these new rules. It's likely other PAF vendors will catch up over the coming years.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of postcodes.io and work for ideal-postcodes.co.uk
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