[Gllug] How does a web site know where I am geographically

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 08:42:40PM +0000, John Winters wrote:
> Any suggestions?

In theory you can map IP addresses to their geographical location.  A
good place to start is to look at where [physically] the IP address
was allocated in the first place.  This is known in internet marketing
as "geo-targeting".  Of course as many people on this list will be
quick to point out there are many many pitfalls and inaccuracies in
this approach (eg. what about IP addresses which have been reassigned
since originally allocated?  What about people dialing ISPs in
different countries?  What about people with static IPs on the move?
What about global ISPs like AOL?  What about people ssh-ing to their
university computers in the US?)

We use geo-targeting, although we advise our clients that it's hardly
accurate.  We particularly like: http://hostip.info/ which is a
GPL-licensed community-built map of IP addresses to countries, cities,
longitude and latitude.  See also: http://merjis.com/developers/hostip

Here's another link, from Google's recently acquired web analytics
package: http://www.google.com/analytics/feature_geotargeting.html

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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