Main Content

Where in the world / country is my visitor from?

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-02-07 08:15:39 - Graham Ellis

If you visit of current traffic page you'll see that we identify users by country - and we do this using the Maxmind Geolocation Technology. You'll see it's on a country by country basis - Open Source data (currently under the "Geolocation technology" button on their front page, and some simple APIs in various languages, let us use a 500k file to look up IP addresses very rapidly. You'll find that we also use the same algorithm to ensure that we tailor our pages to suit you when you arrive on our site - for example, we'll present our phone number as you would dial it from your country.

There's now a Region / Town database available Open Source on the same site too - a much bigger data file download of around 15Mbytes and I have not yet had a chance to play with it - but I do know that a lot of former customers and other readers of these notes want to do more accurate geolocation than "percountry" so I thought I would pass you the tip. I can also point you at a portal that uses the database run by one of our customers. It's here and you can type in an IP address and get a Google map to show you (roughly) where it is. Neat one!