deduce your approximate location from your ip address.
Green granite, you've got it in one there. "Approximate" is the word.
The mobile phone companies can track you down much closer than that !
Deducing location from IP addresses, or "geolocation", as Saab points out, is (a) an artform, (b) not always accurate.
It is the holy grail. There are lots of companies out there that have a genuine need for accurate geolocation, and would pay millions for the data. Companies such as Akamai, who provide local hosting services for websites with heavy traffic such as large e-commerce sites. They would love to have a magic list that would be guaranteed to point you to their nearest server cluster so that you can browse the busy website of your choice at higher speeds, but instead, they have to take a best guess and hope for the best that they've sent you to the right place. Google too would love to do a better job of balancing search traffic around their global network. But it's just not possible to be that precise. I believe Akamai offer their clients a 99% guarantee on geolocation accuracy when using their technology, but the small print limits that guarantee to country code level, and they can only offer that guarantee because they have some very fancy algorithms that amalgamate data from their 34000 servers plus various other bits of kit spread around 70 countries !
Akamai will show you what they know about your location on this page :
How Our Personalization Works
Saab,
Bear in mind that the WHOIS data is not the stuff that's compiled, any non-authorised use of that (whether commercial or otherwise) is prohibited. What does get compiled is, for example, the lists of IP adddresses that the regional organisations such as RIPE have been allocated by IANA. This is then mixed with other scraps from elsewhere, but WHOIS itself is a no no.*
* = won't stop spammers, I know
