Re:Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API
by schlipity on Friday December 08, 2017 @06:13PM
(#15882942)
It's fine as long as you're willing to accept that it's going to be wrong an unknown amount of the time.
Unkown, but very probably within a certain range whose boundaries are known.
Re:Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API
by squarefoot on Friday December 08, 2017 @08:27PM
(#15883648)
In my case it gets country and city but misses completely the ZIP and area, as did all similar services tried so far. If someone threw a non nuclear missile to those coordinates I would probably just hear a distant bang.
I'm curious to know if other people noticed the same level of accuracy.
Re:Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API
by jonathan-kosgei on Sunday December 10, 2017 @06:48AM
(#15891029)
IP Geolocation might never be the silver bullet for determining user location. Like I've mentioned before if it can't pin you exactly it'll give your co-ordinates as being at the center of the population. Use it where you're okay with having a general idea of your user's location or as a fallback where other means of geolocation are not available eg. via browser, or GPS via mobile apps
Indeed. Certainly most useful for getting a ballpark idea of where, in general, your users are located. I would guess anything that really depends on knowing an individual user's location oughta use something more specific. But you could, say, put certain countries or languages as the default of a drop-down based on IP and be right and bunch of the time, while still allowing the user to make a different choice easily.
It's such an extreme edge case that it doesn't really matter. (unless you are of course targeting that type of market).
In other words, IP address gives a general location in a huge number of cases.