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identifying where an aol user is at

         

Frank_Rizzo

11:44 pm on Sep 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Is there a way to identify in which part of the country a certain AOL IP address is?

Running a whois on some of the other big UK isps indicates which main town or city they are in. But I can't find this information for AOL.

Is it possible to identify the location from the IP address or the iptcode?

Shane

11:59 pm on Sep 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




I looked at this last January. It is a tough nut to crack. Without extra work the answer then was no, you can not tell where an AOL user is from.

We had several ideas to start to narrow some of it down. One idea was to get the routing thorugh the network and to examine the network codes. (I think this worked for AOL and non-AOL users). Every month we would add these to the database and crack a few more of the codes allowing us to identify where more users were from. However, it is neither quick nor fool-proof.

There also were some companies that by embedding a gif on your page would tell you where someone was from. Again, the results on AOL users was iffy at best. (This may have changed.)

The last idea was to have people tell us where they were from. Offer a prize. We could then place a cookie and track the visits from them and know their location. The information wasn't worth that much to us so we didn't pursue it.

Because AOL funnels all traffic through Virgina and they use dynamic IP addressing, they are hard to deal with. (dynamic IP addressing, each request from a user comes onto the internet with a different IP address. IP addresses are assigned on the fly and reused several times in a minute. This saves AOL money because they need to use fewer IP addresses and they do cost money.)

Maybe something has changed since January, but I doubt it.

Hope this helps. I don't guarantee it's accuracy but it is the just of what I can recall. If you find a solution, I'd like to hear of it.

Good Luck,
Shane

Shane

12:15 am on Sep 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



You can see more at:

[webmasterworld.com...]

And more to your issue:

[webmasterworld.com...]

(Hope this works, it is the first time I have added a link to message!?)

Some background on problems with AOL:

[webmasterworld.com...]

..... Shane