Ask YC: open geoip databases?

[zkinion]

Hello,

Is anybody else using geoip on their sites? I remember I used it a while back and it was off of a maxmind database. Is there anything else out there besides maxmind? Google isn't much help here.

[alex_c]

I use the free Maxmind country database.

[extantproject]

The GeoLite Country database at:

http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry)

is just fine for countries. The Ruby gem works nicely:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...

... and there are other APIs as well:

http://www.maxmind.com/app/api

MaxMind is the standard.

[apgwoz]

http://www.hostip.info works great for me on www.newshoured.com

[subwindow]

I looked for a solid week earlier this year, and didn't find anything that was really free or open. Kind of disappointing.

What I needed was to be able to take an IP, and get a reasonably accurate (25 miles) lat/long out of it. If anyone knows of one that exists, please let me know...

[extantproject → subwindow]

The MaxMind GeoIP City Database includes latitude and longitude. You could buy their "Web Service" at $20 per 50,000 queries...

[zkinion → extantproject]

I guess if you were really clever you could cache it too, if you had a site with a ton of traffic.

[bluelu → zkinion]

Just hope that you get you get returning visitors then. And even then, address mappings change over time.

[xavios]

http://geocoder.us/. It's very accurate and you can set it up locally for speed -- it uses Perl and BerkeleyDB and the TIGER database