IP to Company API Global Support
We're happy to announce that our IP to Company API now returns results for every country.
Why is this significant?
Our original version of the API limited results to only North America. Later on, we added Australia, the UK, and India. Obviously this was not ideal, and adding global support was among the top requests from customers.
Today that is no longer an issue. For any given IP address, our system will scour the web to find all available data for the organization behind the IP, then predict whether the IP is:
- An ISP
- A hosting provider and/or bot
- An actual employee of that company
How the original API worked
One of the more difficult problems in building an IP to company lookup API is classifying records correctly. While it’s relatively easy to look up the company managing a given IP address, classifying it is much harder.
Our first attempt at tackling this problem was via brute force and involved acquiring lists of every known ISP and hosting provider. We’d then reference this list when running lookups and if a given company was on the list, we’d flag it accordingly.
The issue with this method is that companies are created and shut down constantly, which made keeping the list up to date challenging. Secondly, we noticed that our list was skewed towards English speaking countries, as it was difficult to acquire this data on a global scale.
Thus to ensure quality and avoid misclassifying IPs, we decided to whitelist results for predominantly English speaking countries. This worked initially, as most of our customers, and our customers’ customers, were based in the United States.
The new API
Classifications are now powered by a new ML model. For every IP, the model looks at a variety of features and will predict the likelihood of the IP being an ISP, hosting provider, or company.
It’s a significant boost to our classification ability, as classification is no longer dependent on lists that quickly become out of date, and enables us to reliably predict results on a global scale. The model is continually improving as we feed it more data as well.
How can I try it?
If you’re interested in trying out the new API, you can create an account and get a free API key. Or if you’re not technical, you can contact our team and we can help you run an analysis.
