map based on users ip

Question

hi,

how to create a users location map based on the ip address. i collect the ip address of users coming to the site and i want to show a map with their location based on the ipaddress that I collected. Is there any map service which is available to use, i am fine if we need to pay anything to have more queries. thanks.

Answer 1

See here:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/basics.html#DetectingUserLocation

Not really a maps question since you use the map only to plot what you've detected by other means.

Answer 2

There are services that offer IP-to-location databases, for example MaxMind. You will need to keep these databases updated, since IPs change over time. The free versions are of slightly lower accuracy and updated less often. Identifying locations by IP is a low-accuracy affair though anyway, so it might be enough for your purpose. You then just need to output the results on a map, which you can do using, for example, the Google Maps API.