One of the coolest features of Smart Map is the ability to center the map dynamically on each visitor's city, plus return Local search results featuring their company.
The way this works is each visitor to your web site has an IP address. Smart Map grabs this IP address from the meta data and attempts to geocode it using one of two services that are integrated into the Smart Map module settings: HostIP and MaxMind.
HostIP is a free IP lookup service that returns accurate information only a small percentage of the time. The HostIP geocoder does not need a key to activate and is ready to use simply by selecting HostIP in the IP Lookup Service field of the Smart Map Module settings.
MaxMind, on the other hand, is a commercial third party service that returns highly accurate results more than 95% of the time. If you want to really impress your web site visitors, it is highly recommended that you spend a few bucks to obtain a key from MaxMind's IP geocoding service to activate this service.
Here is the data returned from a successful IP lookup using MaxMind:
- City
- State
- Country
- Organization
- ISP: Internet Service Provider
- Latitude
- Longitude
Smart map uses this information to perform a Local search through Google.
How Much Does it Cost?
MaxMind charges just $20 for 50,000 IP address lookups. To prevent looking up the same IP address twice, Smart Map caches the IP lookup information in a database table that it first consults before doing a lookup at MaxMind.