Question

I don’t want to have the user install Google Gears so I can show him his guessed location. Is there a way to get the location without having to use Google Gears?

I have found http://www.wipmania.com/de/blog/google-geolocation-api/ but it does not offer an example.

Answer 1

This is typically called IP Geolocation.

An example is here.

The thing is, most sites (if you plan on calling this as a web service) will charge you for it. Otherwise, throw together a web service that grabs a geolocation page, parses it for the address, and returns that piece of information.

In PHP, this seems to work pretty well:

<?php  if(isset($_GET['ip'])){    echo geolocate($_GET['ip']);  }   function geolocate($ip){    $raw_html = file_get_contents('http://www.geody.com/geoip.php?ip=$ip');    if(preg_match('/Location:(.*)/',$raw_html,$matches)){      $location_raw = $matches[1];       //Get rid of pesky HTML tags      $location = preg_replace('/<[^>]*>/','',$location_raw);      return $location;    }else{      return 'ERROR';    }  }