Aug 29

MaxMind's Geo-Location Service

Geolocation — the concept of figuring out where your user is from — is one of those things that always sounded simple, but that I had never actually done. The fact is, no client had ever asked me for it.

Then, today, one did. So, I went looking around, and I found MaxMind. I’m absolutely tickled with it.

It’s $20 for 50,000 requests, with no expiration. You call a URL, with your license key and the IP in the querystring, and you get back a short, comma-delimited string with country, state, city, lat, and lon.

I had this up and running in 15 minutes with zero human contact. There’s more information, if you want to pay for access to additional databases. See all the info they can find on your IP address.

This is an example of a small, fast, simple service that I will gladly pay for. The world needs more of these.

by Deane   August 29, 2008 5:26 PM   |

Comments

by Bob Sawyer,   August 29, 2008 6:16 PM  

We used MaxMind at my last full-time gig. Great service, great product. And like you, we had it up and running in no time.

by hjmler,   August 29, 2008 10:20 PM  

they had my area codes wrong, my city wrong, my lat 'n long wrong, they had the isp's city wrong too, and the zip code wrong

by Eric,   August 30, 2008 12:52 AM  

Location from IP address just fails way to often that I'm surprised that it is even offered as services anymore. Like hjmler, all my info was incorrect - I am in the Portland Oregon area.

by Josh Clark,   August 30, 2008 6:31 AM  

With the caveats about IP address mentioned above, thought I'd mention Google's free new JavaScript API that lets you grab lat, long, city, country, region info based on the visitor's IP address: http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/documentation/#ClientLocation

Yahoo also has an interesting free REST API for geolocation, although it doesn't offer resolution based on IP address: http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/

by Tim,   October 10, 2008 7:16 PM  

We are using Web API from IP2Location.com. They are better in handling hjmler and Eric's concerns.

http://www.ip2location.com

by Steve,   October 11, 2008 8:48 AM  

The above comment appears to be from IP2location itself, promoting their own services, if you click on "Tim" you'll go to ipaddressguide.com, which is owned by the same company that ip2location is.

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