Thread: Finding the County of visitors

Hi,

I need to create reports on which county visitors to a web page are in.

How would one do that in a hypothetical situation?

The main way of identifying users location is IP address, sadly these are not accurately defined (locationwise) in Ireland by Irish ISPs.

Unfortunately some people seem to think you can *sigh*

Hmm.

A property website in Irelnad offers reports that shows from which counties visitors are.

Are they inaccurate then?

I typically show up as New Ross, but last time I looked outside I was still in Dublin city

Originally Posted by JamesFarrell

Hmm.

A property website in Irelnad offers reports that shows from which counties visitors are.

Are they inaccurate then?

Totally

If you take Eircom, for example, your IP address is reported as the main exchange. In the case of Carlow, for example, the main exchange is miles away and its name is NOT Carlow

County / town / city stats in Ireland are practically impossible to get. It's a different story in the US

If you go through a corporate firewall .. it'll also tend to put you in the location of that firewall .. so on a few sites things show up coming from the US they they are probably originating in ireland

You could try using google trends for sites but again, it depends on the end persons internet setup, i.e if they're going through a proxy server etc.

I'm going to chime in here with the rest and tell you that its impossible. I sometimes show up as Limerick various geo-IP websites, but I was in Naas a the time. And having used to work for Eircom, I knew why. (As BB support... The amount of calls we got where users would ask us to edit their location correctly was hilarious... Pretty sure they were all men, and wanted those ads that tell you that you can meet girls in "rathcoole" to be actually where they lived) However, in the two years since I left Eircom I have completely forgotten the reason...

As for the property site that is doing it... they are making an assumption I bet. If an IP searches for houses in Cork, they're going to say that that IP is in Cork. Its dirty but I'd say its about 80% accurate.

ok, so if I was going to badly guess users locations, I would need a database of ip address locations is that right?

Can anyone point me toward a php script which could do the business or is a there a 3rd party vendor that offer such and such as a service?

EDIT: I have since come across this - GEO IP Database community Contributions

Any further suggestions would be welcomed