Comments on: Implicit Personalization on Tribe.net

By: Mike Purvis

Mike Purvis — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It is smart… I hadn’t yet noticed this type of behaviour in the content of a site, but I had seen it in the advertising on less scrupulous domains. (“Adult personals are waiting for ME in Toronto…”)

Is it possible that Google does the same thing? Or is that just the Google Cookie getting set when I first visit Google.ca?

By: louis

louis — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

efax.com does this as well.

where do they get a table of ips relating to region? is this public information?

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think google does it for Canada, but i’m not 100% sure…

By: Trent

Trent — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I've only seen this data as privately purchased information, as available from data collections services like ip2location. If anyone knows any different... such customization would be a great open-source utility.

By: Chris Vincent

Chris Vincent — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I recently suspected that Google might be doing this with AdSense. On Malarkey’s site, for example, the ads mentioned “Kansas Web Design”. I live in Wichita, but Malarkey is in the UK, and his site mentions nothing of Great Plains, America.

By: Rodrigo

Rodrigo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

ip-to-country offers a csv file that relates ip ranges to country codes. I think it's for free. Chris, Google does target their ads by location. It's even one of the options when creating a new ad. We've targeted our PHP interniship advertisemet that way. Alas, no answers yet.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

IP-to-country is nice, but getting down to the city level is really the key. I know Digital Envoy offers a service to do this for you, but it's not free.

By: Mark Huot

Mark Huot — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You also could use a PHP script to query a whois server and get the users ZIPCODE then using publicly available data get the city and state from that. The only problem is that whois servers are not as reliable as they used to be for returning accurate information. Also, if a person is using AOL their IP may not map back to their local address.

(Editor’s Note: Interesting idea, but wouldn’t this take quite awhile to execute? I think you’d probably need to be in possession of the table in advance so that all it takes to get what you need is a quick DB lookup.)

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a nice idea but it is not full proof.

I live in England and it thinks i’m from San Fan… not sure how that happened?

This would work well on Yahoo, news sites, weather sites etc etc.

By: Chris Gwynne

Chris Gwynne — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chris, the same happens for me. Nice feature to have but it’s not great.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Some time ago I visited Cingular.com from my work computer, and it was provided targeted information about discounts for employees of my company, including the company name, even though I had never been there before. I thought that was a great use of IP information.

Visited today and didn’t see the same thing, so I don’t know if they stopped doing it, or if my company no longer has discounts, or what.

By: Trent

Trent — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Other than WHOIS, is there any other available process used to grab information (region, company) via IP? Or are these “geo-locator-blah data collection companies” simply cataloguing this public information and reselling it?

By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It got my state right, but it didn’t give me my city/town. Guess it’s just not populous enough ’round here…

By: Mark Payne

Mark Payne — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I noticed the same thing through the same link. I was quite impressed.

By: Kevin Cheng

Kevin Cheng — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The problem is the many countries have major ISPs that route themselves through North America because the infrastructure is more established there and can sometimes yield better results. This has often been suggested as a solution for internationalization where sites have global offices but while guessing right is great, guessing wrong is really really bad because you can’t guarantee the visitor even noticed that you tried to guess.

And yes, Google tries the same. I’ve seen google Hong Kong, UK and Canada all pulled up at the various locations I’ve opened my browser of late.