Supertracker - wrong countries ?

[mne]

The visitors countries given by the Supertracker seems to be wrong.

 

shown:

 

Customer IP Address/Country: 83.93.120.15 (Portugal)

 

???

 

this should be Denmark

[radders]

There is a service that advertises iN Google adwords that shows my IP address in France instead of the UK. The free one gets it right though. I know that IP tracing is an imprecise art but some databases are more accurate and up-to-date than others.

Of course it might be a calculation error in the code.

 

I see with this one ShowmyIP gets it right.

Edited August 21, 2005 by radders

[equilla]

Hi there,

 

thanks for your observation - the IP/country conversion is only going to be as good as the underlying database. I haven't re-invented the wheel here, but am using Maxmind's GeoIP database for the Supertracker contribution - for more information regarding it's accuracy see here - http://www.maxmind.com/app/faq#accurate.

 

Regards,

[radders]

I noticed a free database of IP to country lookups fro php and mysql at 32tech

[equilla]

Yes, I saw this one the other day too - what I might do is to run it side by side with Maxmind's solution on a couple of my stores to see how often they come up with different answers.

 

Once I have an indication of the scale of the differences between the 2, the problem of course will be knowing which one gives the correct answers more often.

 

Perhaps I could set up a page and invite osC users from around the world to visit and enter the actual country they are in. The page would record their entry and their IP address and then I can run an analysis to help with above - thoughts?

 

Regards,

[radders]

Well I'd give it a try. I notice there is some similar exercise over at hostip They always et my coutry right but each time I use it they guess a different area of the country. And Yes I do have a static IP address.