14 DAY TRIAL // For an easy way to geographically locate an IP there is always a nice, comfortable solution in the form of the various web services that do the tracing. You don't need to clutter your computer with yet another software that you are going to use only every now and then, anyway. However, if you are an eager beaver and are always on the tail of every IP that gets in your way, you definitely find working with an online service slow and time consuming.
An almost instant result is what you want and unfortunately this does not depend on you. But good news is on the way as GeoBytes (I guess you know what they do) let loose a little toolbar that integrates into your web browser (IE and Firefox only for now) and acts as a regular IP locator. The advantage is that, with this toolbar, the results are returned much faster (actually they are displayed on the spot) and it comes with additional functions, all linked to GeoBytes activity.
The application is in beta stage at the moment, so glitches are to be expected. It installs painlessly and integrates with absolutely no fuss into Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. If both web browsers are available in the system you get to chose which one should benefit from the services of Geobytes toolbar. Immediately after installation, you will have to define your current location to the application so that local searching to be available.
Everything is automatic, so there's nothing to worry about. The software will first provide a list with countries, and then break them into regions which, in turn, are fragmented into cities. So all that's left for you to do is to click on the desired geo location and it'll be automatically added to the list. This is specially useful if you want to use the local search function that seems to limit all search results to the region you define as your own.
The feature is a Google customized search that confines the return of results from the region you define. So, this basically means that, if you are trying to search for a subject in a specific area, all you have to do is utilize locale search function. Unfortunately, employing this feature will not guarantee more accuracy of the results and these in turn will not be limited to the region you had defined. But there seem to be problems with the custom search, as in my case it happened frequently no results to be returned.
The IP locator included in the toolbar functions exactly as the online service, with the only difference that the results are returned much faster (almost instantly). Lookup information consists of country code, accuracy level, country, city code, state/region, longitude and latitude. Besides all this regular info, the window also makes available a geographic map pinpointing the location of the searched IP. More than this, all the information can be copied to clipboard and pasted into a document of your choice.
Additional data on the address can be obtained at a single click, which launches the website and completes the details with adding city ID, country flag, timezone, currency, or nationality of the population. For even more details, a Google map is displayed in the lower part of the screen, allowing you to zoom in and out for more details.
Another tool coming with the toolbar is the City Distance Calculator. Its purpose is easy to guess and the results are retrieved immediately. However, comparing the distance with additional services on the web, it resulted that the accuracy of GeoBytes toolbar is not at high levels, as sometimes even differences of hundreds of kilometers were recorded. So we can say that the City Distance Calculator offered by GeoBytes could only help you in providing rough information, as there is no detail on the method of calculating the distance (shortest distance is a straight line, but how often can you follow it?).
I have to admit that the toolbar is quite complicated as it incorporates plenty of services and the entire app can be configured to make the most of it in the most comfortable way. You get to set the relevance thresholds for country, region/state and city/location for local search to be as accurate as possible (the thresholds represent the traffic percentage originating from a given geographic location to be considered relevant). The units of measure can be switched from imperial to metrics with a single click.
Creating an account with GeoBytes permits buying mapbytes and getting rid of all annoying ads that stem from the use of the free services such as GeoDirection, GeoPhrase and GeoFlag. Creating the account is absolutely free and all you have to do is register an email address and the password will be sent to you automatically.
Geo-Highlighter options are nothing but a nifty way to set the software to bring out results from your own location. You can define the colors to be used for text and background as well as use text attributes like Bold and Italic. A blacklist with websites for which you want to disable the highlighting can be created at the bottom of the screen.
Next in line comes "mapbytes" configuration. The toolbar features an indicator by default, to see the level of mapbytes you've reached, but this can be disabled from Options menu. During our testing, hiding the indicator resulted in a useless action sometimes, as the bar would not go away. But this only happened on Mozilla Firefox, which was more feeble then usual and crash frequency increased.
Text advertising is the last on the list and its flexibility brings more value to the application itself as you can turn it off or on, depending on how annoying you find it. It will display GeoBytes ads on hovering over almost any link in a webpage. Actually it's not proper advertising as you will suck some information out of the displaying window, such as relevance percentage regarding geo-location and distance from your location. This may become annoying at some point, but leaving it on will get you more mapbytes. So, it all becomes a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" deal.
The application is still at the beginning of the road and not all the functions are working as they should. Link Summary, for instance, takes quite a while to load and it does not display the number of links it found. And, during our testing, it definitely did not pick all of them. But the good thing is that you can copy all the information to the clipboard and, when pasting, it will be neatly organized.
The Good
GeoBytes Toolbar integrates perfectly into Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. It returns IP Locator results a whole lot faster (almost instantly) and preserves the accuracy of the online service.
The toolbar can be disabled directly from its settings and activating it can be done from web browser's add-in manager. Removing it completely from the system requires uninstalling it the regular way.
The Bad
Beta stage is felt all over. There are plenty of issues to be fixed, especially when running in Firefox. Link Summary dis not pick up all the links in the page during our testing and pinpointing the locations may not be that accurate.
City Distance Calculator will only give you an informative distance from one point to another but you can safely add 100 or 200 Km to the result.
The Truth
For now, GeoBytes Toolbar can be used only for the incorporated IP Locator which does the same job as the online service, only much faster.
However, the functions available in the application are worthy of integrating it in the web browser, especially if you like to trace the origin of IP addresses or need local search.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
