CODEWITHSUNDEEP
geolocationlocation
slandau
slandau

Reputation: 24052

How to find users' location during a web site visit?

So, I want to be able to find the users location (even if it's only down to the city/town level), when they log onto the home page of my website. I figured this isn't impossible because Google seems to do it when you log on their main page, it seems to gear your search results toward your area, etc.

What would I look into to be able to do this?

Upvotes: 19

Views: 31060

Answers (6)

Nikhil Yadav
Nikhil Yadav

Reputation: 23

I would like to add another solution because of some issues I faced. All the earlier answers work very well. But if you'll use HTML Geolocation API you'll have to ask for the location permission from the user. IPinfo works very well but some adblockers like ublock will block the API hit from the client side.

If it is possible for you to change your DNS manager to CLoudflare then you can use Cloudflare IP Geolocation. You can refer to Don's answer here

Upvotes: 1

lazydeveloper
lazydeveloper

Reputation: 961

you can use navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition in HTML5.It would be reasonably cross-platform and you could build it into web pages that report back to your database. See

http://html5demos.com/geo
http://www.w3.org/TR/geolocation-API/
http://diveintohtml5.info/geolocation.html

Upvotes: 0

Dave Sag
Dave Sag

Reputation: 13486

If you don't care about super-fine accuracy, and you don't want to annoy your user with an alert requesting their permission to access their location, then you can make use of something like FreeGeoIP. I've written a small jQuery plugin that makes use of this. See the Locaternator. Supports jsonp requests too so you can use it from any website, including static html only webs.

Upvotes: 0

Paul Sasik
Paul Sasik

Reputation: 81429

You need to use an IP geo/co-location API such as this one and many others. This one boasts a free service requiring only registration.

You can also download databases with geo code information. This will work to certain resolution but the db represents a static snapshot and reality may veer significantly over time. Here is a freely available CSV file that could get you started on the local db side of things. The CSV file (which is a bit old, was last updated August 2009) contains 59,000 entries.

Upvotes: 8

Richard H
Richard H

Reputation: 39055

YOu can either a) use an online service to look up the location - many have an api, or b) there are numerous databases floating around the web that you can download. Depending on the resolution you need, you may have to pay. But country resolution is certainly available for free. Try googling "geo ip" or similar.

Upvotes: 1

Gnat
Gnat

Reputation: 2921

You can use GeoIP location services, who have various levels of accuracy. There may be other providers of IP-location databases too.

Another option is to try to use HTML5 location services, such as in http://html5demos.com/geo and http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html.

Upvotes: 13

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