whatismyip.com uses digitalelement. I haven’t found them to be as accurate. They have me 7k from where I actually am – while ip2location has me within 400m. Perhaps their database is more accurate in the US as well.
From my experience ip2location offers a fair service at a fair price – where digitalelement is more expensive and maxmind is also pretty good but they can be more costly as well.
While I agree with you that doing a database lookup will never be as accurate as getting the physical location via the device, you have to look at the percentage of users who block their location by default or decline to provide it when prompted. It’s more than half.
Understanding this, having an ip database as a fall back at least gets us in the ballpark.
You have to think about user experience beyond that. With the goal of providing a “closer to” Yelp/Foursquare/Places-like experience, we should still have the ability to make a best-guess assumption for visitors who decline their location rather than simply choosing a default location which could put them on the other side of the planet.
Again, these are subscription services as well. They cost money and they use database resources. I understand that not all of your clients are super serious or have real revenues with their sites. But those who are will probably find this to be valuable.
I do think it’d be an interesting and valuable option for to at least provide this ability as a fallback when access to their device is declined.
I’d also be willing to look at paying for the mod to have it implemented into the core so that everyone could enjoy it.
Most of the heavy lifting has already been done because you have the lat/lon searching built in. Looking at their code instructions it’d be a simple call to the db to translate the ip to a more easily searchable number to decrease the tax on the database and then use the framework you already have.
Further, they have an affiliate program that pays a 10% lifetime referral fee. You guys could use it as an income center to continue to bolster revenues and continue to build out the app.
Be that as it may, all the GEOIP databases seem to work similarly – so giving users the option as to which service they want to use would probably also not be too big a task.
After understanding my position, and the real benefits to the user experience, I’m curious to get your thoughts.
John
Paolo 9 years, 4 months ago.
