<p>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?</p>

<p>I have found <a href="http://www.wipmania.com/de/blog/google-geolocation-api/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.wipmania.com/de/blog/google-geolocation-api/</a> but it does not offer an example.</p>

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";
   }
 }
```
```