Shane Henderson | Life at Match.com

Today we turned on geography detection by ip address.  The basic premise of this great concept is to take an ip address and look up a user's location (in this case the country only) and react on the result.  In our case it was to automatically route our users to one of our international sites automatically instead of them choosing their country through a popup or interstitial page. 

We purchased a product from Maxmind called GeoIP that seems to work really well.  They base their company on an open-source hybrid business model where you buy the data and they provide the open source API of your choice.  I used the C# class that they provided and changed it up a bit (I had to tweak the performance a bit so it could handle our load and add in our custom exception handling).

Right now we are only using the country lookup functionality but I hope to enhance it to include state, city, longitude, latitude, and ISP soon.