Offer HN: Announcing free geolocation web API

12 points by sagacity ↗ HN
Hi to all here from a recently registered (and semi-retired) ancient hacker.

I've noticed in the past few days that there is a good number of people here working on/running projects requiring or likely to benefit from various types of geolocation lookups.

I also found that while people are using free Google/Yahoo/other APIs for this purpose, many are not happy with the quota limits / speed and/or other aspects of these.

Inspired by this, in spirit of 'hackerism' facilitated by the good timing, since we recently happened to work on IP to geolocation (as a small part of a larger project), we've put together a 'quick-and-dirty' free geolocation web API. It is my pleasure and privilege to announce its availability here at HN.

We'll be adding one or two more similar APIs (with slightly different functionalities) soon.

For now, we've set a per account limit of 10k calls/day; we may revise it as we go.

Trial codes (good for 100 calls) are also available so that people can test it quickly, without registering.

I invite all those who are interested in this to check it out and provide general feedback / feature requests and/or bug reports etc. (Expect at least some rough edges here and there – both on the site and the API, we'll revise as we go.)

Depending on the response and interest (mainly from HN), we're committed to continuing and expanding this further. Tell me what you think.

http://IPLoc.info/api

6 comments

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Looks cool, I expect to give it a try. Was leaning towards SimpleGeo.
The maximum depth you can go is city and not address? Where does your data come from? I remember looking into this open source database for geolocaitons called openstreetmap. I think they power the open mapquest apis. From what I recall, they have some MASSIVE database on geolocation data.
OpenStreetMap has a ton of open map data, but I don't think they have an IP->location database. I can't seem to find any info on one, anyway. They are a good free source for "reverse geocoding", getting a street address given a lat/lon.
I'll look into using this for a project I'm working on. For my purposes, I only need detail down to the zip code level, so the lack of depth is okay.
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