Experimental Comparison of Free IP Geolocation Services

Abstract

IP geolocation services is used to locate the geographical location of an IP address, which has an important means for mapping cyberspace to the physical world. There are many location methods, such as delay-based method, database-driven method and topology-driven method. Currently, the mainstream IP geolocation services generally use a combination of different methods. We have collected some free IP geolocation services and studied their usage. Online geolocation services include: ip-api.com, ip.taobao.com, Baidu Map API, and Sina IPLOOKUP. Local services include: GeoLite2, ChunZhen database, IPPLUS360 and ipip.net. In the project cooperation, we obtained the IP address data of a city in China. Using the IP address data of the city as a data set, we conducted an experimental comparison of these IP geolocation services. The analysis and comparison of these IP geolocation services were carried out from three angles of data richness, query accuracy and query speed. It is found that the accuracy of online geolocation services is generally higher than that of local services, but the query speed is generally lower than that of local services. Specifically, different query service accuracy and query speed are different, and the difference is obvious, and few geolocation services can provide county-level information. We also found that the accuracy of some geolocation services needs to be improved. These results can be used as references for researchers with similar needs.