On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 08:09 -1000, Scott Weeks wrote:
----- Original Message Follows ----- From: Jeff Rosowski <rosowskij@ie.ymp.gov>
I just tried that, says I'm 100 miles south of where I really am. That's quite a long way out in a small country like England.
Only 100 miles? I entered the address of a box I have in Virginia, and it says it's in California. Well at least it got the country right.
One of the geolocation thingies said my addresses were in Amsterdam. That's only 10,000 miles from Hawaii. 2500 miles more and that's exactly the opposite side of the planet... ;-)
Try http://www.hostip.info it is reasonable accurate in most cases and hell it is for free. It depends what you need it for of course but it is far better than nothing. 64.29.76.9, your mauigateway.com pops up correctly as Honolulu. 205.166.249.10 is guessed to be somewhere random in the US. The problem with this one is that they are still gathering data and they depend on user input, but it looks pretty accurate to what I have found out. Most of these kind of databases rely on user input though. I am quite sure that Google, using their search thing and especially Orkut has quite some info on this. Shopping Sites like Ebay and Amazon of course get their shipping info for free and thus can pretty much pinpoint the city correctly after $x percentage of customers bought from there. Problem in the end is of course when there is a huge pool and the end-users change a lot, but then the country is accurate enough already. Greets, Jeroen