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djlebarron
08 Jan 2010, 02:26 PM
I'm in the process of modifying a GeoIP Dbase set-up. I need the variable that causes area-specific information to be displayed to represent counties and I haven't seen any API's or Dbases that go that extra step.

No loss, though, because two clicks into searching, I found a great service/dbase-source, and I thought I'd share.

http://ipinfodb.com/index.php

They state that city accuracy is around 80%. I know that some rather expensive annual-fee services state that their city accuracy is 99.9%, but I think I've found out why. The people at the link above include 3.7 million IPs in their city dbase, while the others provide less than 3 million. I've weeded out the couple hundred thousand that are: reserved, have no info other than the number generated by script, APO's and FPO's, and the ones that only have a country listed etc. I still ended up with well over 33 million. Not many of those smell of AOL. But this is my first time through this.

The service/downloads at the link above are free, but they do ask for a donation. What they provide looks like it merits one.

I alread have a US postal dbase (not very expensive at all), so I'm incorporating the counties into the IP dbase by cleaning the postal excel files up to match the IP file. I'm dropping both into access, will join the two tables and dump the result into a MySQL table. Some of the IP's have zips but no city name, and some have city names but not zips. I'll have to set defaults for the larger cities, but I should be able to join the two tables by either/or. The php coding looks like it will be a breeze, as I've already set up the same type of thing with wickedly extensive drop down lists elsewhere on my project.

I'm only doing the US, and I'd be using that site's API if I were going worldwide. The complete files are monster sized and make my machine spit at me once in a while. But once I weeded them out and squeezed out only US IP's, they don't hurt the circuits too badly. I am having to go through my "postal" table and re-title a lot of my variable fodder. I should have taken my variable names directly from the postal dbase instead of taking them from my often abbreviated text on the drop-down links. I was saving page space via the narrower drop-downs, but there wasn't really any reason to do it in the actual html link code. Ah well, that's what it's all about. It's only taking me about a day to proof and edit them in the spreedsheet.

Something new. It's fun.

Lechlak
08 Jan 2010, 02:51 PM
Hey thanks for the link! Very interesting.