GeoLite City vs CNGeoip

    Yesterday I tested the Max Ming GeoLite City base . This is a free version of the database, almost no different from the paid version. After studying the contents of the database I came to disappointing conclusions.
    There are a lot of mistakes in the spelling of cities in the database, different spellings (for example, Chelyabinsk and Cheliabinsk) often come across, instead of cities, sometimes they write areas, and sometimes streets. But the biggest problem is that the names of all cities are written only in English / local Latin version. For use on Russian-language resources, such a base is practically unsuitable. To make correspondence of English names to Russian in automatic mode is almost an unrealistic task for the reasons described above. And only fairly large companies can afford to use the work of operators to process about 180,000 locations in the database. The curse of the GeoLite City base can be found even on this forum .
    [I wonder which databases use Google, Yandex?]

    I did not find other good full-fledged databases of cities (not countries) by IP, neither paid nor free, except for one - this is CNGeoip - a module for determining a city and country by IP address. I must say that the base is paid. The cost of the database on one site is 99 WMZ (when paying by WebMoney, on 02/02/2008).
    Now about the possibilities. I tested the base on the manufacturer’s website. There is a demo version for this . All test requests gave a result no worse than GeoLite City. The speed of the operation is not satisfactory.
    But the main advantage of CNGeoip over GeoLite City is that all city and country names are available in both English and Russian! That is, you can easily apply the database on services oriented to the Runet.
    CNGeoip developers on their blog write :
    “The task of determining the user’s city by IP address is not as rare as it seems, it is also an analysis of statistics, banner targeting, automatic configuration of user profiles, etc.
    It’s not that difficult to find a geography base - it’s unprofitable.
    The MaxMinda base has real quality (this is the one that everyone uses, but they don’t pay (GeoIPCity :)). The price of this base is impressive, for a thousand bucks a year exceeds.
    But Russia and the CIS are covered there with errors, sometimes funny. Type city - st. Lenin, etc. Well, in general, all this is already known.
    They began to think long ago to make their decision. They understood why they took the money from the Maxmainders. :) "

    In fact, the quality of the CNGeoip base in the territory of the former USSR far exceeds the quality of GeoLite City. [According to my humble tests. If you have a counterargument, welcome to comment!]
    Testing in practice. Firstly, as I already wrote, you can always test the database on the demo page , where your defined IP and location is written on the left. There is also a form for entering any IP. But of course this was not enough for me. I would like to test the base in real conditions. However, I did not find the laid out database on the Web in open form. While thinking about buying.
    Conclusion . If you are going to create a commercial service in Runet in Russian, which requires the definition of a country and city by IP (for example, auto-substitution of values ​​in the appropriate fields during registration, orconclusion of the weather informer for cities ), you definitely need to look towards CNGeoip. There are no high-quality alternatives. 200 dollars per base plus a year of updates - a penny price.

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