Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

ipdata.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–168 of 168 posts

Re: Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

#161

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

squarefoot wrote: post #142
mtpn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unkown, but very probably within a certain range whose boundaries are known.

In my case it gets country and city but misses completely the ZIP and area, as did all similar services tried so far. If someone threw a non nuclear missile to those coordinates I would probably just hear a distant bang. I'm curious to know if other people noticed the same level of accuracy.

IP Geolocation might never be the silver bullet for determining user location. Like I've mentioned before if it can't pin you exactly it'll give your co-ordinates as being at the center of the population. Use it where you're okay with having a general idea of your user's location or as a fallback where other means of geolocation are not available eg. via browser, or GPS via mobile apps

Re: Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

#162

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

alam2000 wrote: post #154
kelnos wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and you've made up a number that reinforces your point. A number that, if wrong, could negate your point. Many more people are using VPNs these days. It's still not a large percentage, to be sure, but people are indeed doing it. Hell, I'm on my company VPN right now, and this site mis-identified my location because our VPN is set up to route most addresses in AWS's address space through the VPN (and ipdata.co ap…

I agree that IP geolocation is a good approximation. It is never accurate up to street level. Meanwhile, there is API to detect VPN, so that we can aware that the geolocation is good up to the server physical location. https://www.ip2location.com/ip2proxy-web-service

We're working on creating our own offering on this. We'll have Tor Exit node detection first and are planning to make that generally available to all our users within the week at no extra cost.

Re: Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

#163

Post by mtpn »

jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #161
squarefoot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case it gets country and city but misses completely the ZIP and area, as did all similar services tried so far. If someone threw a non nuclear missile to those coordinates I would probably just hear a distant bang. I'm curious to know if other people noticed the same level of accuracy.

IP Geolocation might never be the silver bullet for determining user location. Like I've mentioned before if it can't pin you exactly it'll give your co-ordinates as being at the center of the population. Use it where you're okay with having a general idea of your user's location or as a fallback where other means of geolocation are not available eg. via browser, or GPS via mobile apps

Indeed. Certainly most useful for getting a ballpark idea of where, in general, your users are located. I would guess anything that really depends on knowing an individual user's location oughta use something more specific. But you could, say, put certain countries or languages as the default of a drop-down based on IP and be right and bunch of the time, while still allowing the user to make a different choice easily.

Re: Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

#164

Post by zaarn »

duiker101 wrote: post #91
qwerty456127 wrote: post #60

> Get the following datapoints from any IP address; Again :-( I just wonder if people will ever stop making assumptions about others given their IP address or hair colours and divide the Internet on these slippery grounds. The only legitimate and valid way to determine the client's location automatically is the browser or the OS geolocation API, and for the language it is the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE header. The fact I h…

Believe it or not, you make up about 0.000001%[1] of the internet users. There is no saying in what this can be applied, it doesn't have to be for language or anything like that. It doesn't even have to be anything customer facing, and if it's just some stats you will probably probably just be a bit of noise. Don't get me wrong. I totally agree that this thing is definitely not accurate(it thinks i'm 1300mi away) but…

Believe it or not, but my Mobile carrier frequently hands out IPs that are geolocated to anywhere but my country. I usually get French or Dutch websites.

Re: Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

#165

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

alam2000 wrote: post #154
kelnos wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and you've made up a number that reinforces your point. A number that, if wrong, could negate your point. Many more people are using VPNs these days. It's still not a large percentage, to be sure, but people are indeed doing it. Hell, I'm on my company VPN right now, and this site mis-identified my location because our VPN is set up to route most addresses in AWS's address space through the VPN (and ipdata.co ap…

I agree that IP geolocation is a good approximation. It is never accurate up to street level. Meanwhile, there is API to detect VPN, so that we can aware that the geolocation is good up to the server physical location. https://www.ip2location.com/ip2proxy-web-service

Our API now supports detecting Tor nodes https://api.ipdata.co/103.10.197.50

Re: Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

#166

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

gsaqui wrote: post #71
jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something we'd really like to add to our API and something we're working on.

Are you able to flag if the IP is from a TOR network?

Hi gsqaui, our API now supports detecting Tor nodes https://api.ipdata.co/103.10.197.50

Re: Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API

#168

Post by alam2000 »

hidiegomariani wrote: post #98
coderholic wrote: post #90

Congrats on the launch and the HN coverage @jonathan-kosgei! Looks very similar to my service, https://ipinfo.io : $ curl ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8 { "ip": "8.8.8.8", "hostname": "google-public-dns-a.google.com", "city": "Mountain View", "region": "California", "country": "US", "loc": "37.3860,-122.0840", "org": "AS15169 Google LLC", "postal": "94035", "phone": "650" } It also started as a simple geolocation API when I first…

where do you guys get all this ip-to-location data from?

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN