tags:

views:

106

answers:

1
+1  Q: 

Geocoding an IP Address in Rails

Hello all,

I have GeoKit setup and in general I'm really happy with it.

But I recently tried Geocoding IP Addresses with it and its default results (provided by hostip.info it looks like) don't seem very accurate or complete. Has anyone else had bad results from this?

Is there a better way to GeoCode IPs in Rails?

+2  A: 

Hi Brian,

I've developed GeoMint (a pepper for Shaun Inman's Mint) a few years ago. Back then I've also used hostip.info, which worked fine for me. However, users came up with solutions like maxmind.com (GeoAPI http://www.maxmind.com/app/api). However, what you need to understand (and what some of my users back then didn't) - geotargeting is quite complex, needs a lot of updates and getting a perfect dataset for free will quite likely not work. Although I suspect that country detection is really solid now.

Kitto  2010-08-02 13:22:22
Cool - thanks for the info. Are there paid data sources you can recommend? Would like to get down to city level detection if possible.
Brian Armstrong  2010-08-03 06:42:28
I never tried any paid data sources, so I cannot give you a recommendation on this, sorry. However, Maxmind seems to work with Skyhook (which is/was used by Apple for detecting the location of iPhones when no GPS/GSM location is available) so they seem to have a pretty good service.
Kitto  2010-08-03 10:38:35

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