[RESOLVED] Personal stats. Is it possible?

kaldorn

I recently visited a website offering a customergenerator application that made it possible to know excactly who visited your site (companyname etc). It also sends an e-mail if one of your competitors visit your site.

If anyone wants to take a look its here:
http://interactive.multinet.se/interactive/s05/kundgenerator_no

Note: It's in norwegian and swedish only.

I'm wondering how this is possible and can we do it with php?

Kaldorn

Blulagoon

PHP gives you somehelpful information regarding who is using your site from the $_SERVER super-global array.

You can get the ip address and then do a hostname look up, and ofcourse if your competitor is at work the hostname might show up as their_company.com but it isn't very helpful if they are dialing up to someone like AOL.

$ip = $SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$name = gethostbyaddr($SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

I used this on an online CV, which mailed me everytime someone looked at it. Agency folk got very perplexed when they got a call from me within a matter of minutes of their looking at my CV online 😉

Blu

kaldorn

So it stops there? I got the feeling the could pinpoint the company and give them a call right away. Dial up or not.

I am familiar with ip and hostname but I it sounded like they could do much more.

Kal

bradgrafelman

Well, perhaps they compiled a list of IP addresses/ranges that are known to belong to their competitors. That way, when a page is processed, they simply match the IP against this compliation as well as using a hostname match. If the IP is in the list, or if the hostname resolves to (anything).thecompany.com, then the visitor is labeled as one of the competitors.

EDIT: If you really want to know more, perhaps you can contact that website and inquire as to what they do. Maybe they'll tell you, maybe they wont. Couldn't hurt to try, though.

kaldorn

Thanks guys!

But take a look at this. It puzzles me:
(taken from Q&A)

Question: Is it possible to get information about the visitors email addresses?
Answer: No, but you will get the companyname, website, phone and fax number.

If they have pre-stored company information linked to certain ip addresses, where did they get them from? Is there a public database somewhere?

If it is as easy as they claim it to be, then I definitely want to know how to to it.

Kal

bradgrafelman

Well if they compiled a list of companies and IP ranges, then it would simply take an employee 5 minutes to key in that company's name, phone #, etc. into a database. Then, whenever that IP range is matched, it simply fetches a row in a database using the company name.

kaldorn

Yea but, correct me if i'm wrong, I dont think thats the case here (but that's me...). What happends if a company changes ISP? What about new companies that isnt in the "ip-list"? Then this system would become useless in a little while unless updated. And that lots of work. And if the system can do what it says, the employee shouldn't do anything except showing companyinfo without any extra work.

btw, how can I get the phone # when I only know the ip and host?

Kal

Blulagoon

I've just looked at the site and found some pages in English 😃

From what I can see, they are offering to provide a service that gives you the company name and fax/phone of people visiting your website. Many fairly basic web traffic analysis tools can give you hostname and location, which if you link to an online global business directory can give you the phone and fax numbers for the office of that company nearest that location.

However, be aware that this information is far from perfect. It falls down with dial up, although not many medium to large enterprises use dial up these days, the major problem is people who outsource their mail to a 3rd party hosting company, or have central internet access via VPN or something.

For example, if someone from Ericsson UK visits my site, and because of the way they handle internet access it shows up as Ericsson in Kista, the phone and fax number isn't a lot of good. Mind you, even if you have the UK phone number, it really isn't a lot of use in trying to find who, from which dept was on your site from a company of that size.

Sorry to not be more helpful.

Blu

kaldorn

Ok, thanks for usefull feedback guys! With the limitations this service provides, I dont think it's good enough to use as a reliable marketing tool.

Kal

Weedpacket

There are of course whois records - ownership of domain names and IPs are a matter of public record (for example, phpbuilder.com's record states that its owner, Jupitermedia Corp. is based in Connecticut, US, and supplies street address and phone numbers). But the largest NICs, like ARIN, RIPE and APNIC, will almost certainly take a dim view of some bot bulk-trawling those databases.

And of course, the registrant may not know anything about who or what had contacted you in the first place, and might care even less.🙂