How does Geolocation work

AHarvey · 14 Nov 2019 at 13:17

Hi all,

I understand that there are websites/api's etc where you can search for an IP address and get a location for that IP, not that it's always very accurate.

Does anyone know how these locations are actually generated and how these online sites/APIs get the information to generate the location?

thanks

Rroff · 14 Nov 2019 at 13:25

IIRC it is a mixture of the information an ISP uses when submitting a request for a block of IPs and analysis of a traceroute - neither of which is generally that accurate.

Though I've noticed my BT IPs tend to be fairly accurate location wise while other ISPs and my 4G etc. is generally out by quite a bit - sometimes even the wrong side of the country.

GravyMonster · 15 Nov 2019 at 09:41

It's basically a big lookup-table matching known IP ranges to locations: https://usersinsights.com/how-the-geolocation-works/

This is why geolocation by IP is often inaccurate, or out of date. If you have any other method of locating a user I'd suggest using that instead.

AHarvey · 15 Nov 2019 at 10:50

Rroff said:
IIRC it is a mixture of the information an ISP uses when submitting a request for a block of IPs and analysis of a traceroute - neither of which is generally that accurate.

Though I've noticed my BT IPs tend to be fairly accurate location wise while other ISPs and my 4G etc. is generally out by quite a bit - sometimes even the wrong side of the country.

Thanks for the info

Spunkey said:
It's basically a big lookup-table matching known IP ranges to locations: https://usersinsights.com/how-the-geolocation-works/

This is why geolocation by IP is often inaccurate, or out of date. If you have any other method of locating a user I'd suggest using that instead.

We actually use it as a tiny part of the anti-fraud system at work however the accuracy is causing some issues.

My idea was to try and find out exactly how the information is provided and see if we can possibly look at a way of having a system in place where ISP's provide IP addresses with the town/area using them through a live system. It's similar to what we do already with insurance/finance/gov sectors so we already have the processes in place to handle this, it's just a case of getting ISP's or any governing/membership bodies on board.