Is there a way to get the users location without having the user install Google Gears?

I don't want to have the user install Google Gears so I can show him his guessed location. Is there a way to get the location without having to use Google Gears?

I have found http://www.wipmania.com/de/blog/google-geolocation-api/ but it does not offer an example.

Solution

This is typically called IP Geolocation.

An example is here.

The thing is, most sites (if you plan on calling this as a web service) will charge you for it. Otherwise, throw together a web service that grabs a geolocation page, parses it for the address, and returns that piece of information.

In PHP, this seems to work pretty well:

<?php
 if(isset($_GET["ip"])){
   echo geolocate($_GET["ip"]);
 }

 function geolocate($ip){
   $raw_html = file_get_contents("http://www.geody.com/geoip.php?ip=$ip");
   if(preg_match('/Location:(.*)/',$raw_html,$matches)){
     $location_raw = $matches[1];

     //Get rid of pesky HTML tags
     $location = preg_replace("/<[^>]*>/","",$location_raw);
     return $location;
   }else{
     return "ERROR";
   }
 }