It is often useful, when testing or troubleshooting access problems (especially when a user is having trouble accessing an electronic resource such as a database or e-journal), to find out one’s IP address. There are a number of commercial sites which provide this service, along with a bunch of ads. In its neverending quest to be everything to everyone, Google is now also doing this – and it’s probably the easiest way to obtain this information. Just go to google.com and type “IP” into the search box; at the top of your search results you will see something like: “Your public IP address is 129.79.34.31 – Learn More”
This trick will also work in DuckDuckGo, which gives you your city/state/zip code in addition to your IP address. (How does it know where you are? Your IP address includes that information. Sneaky little IP address!)
For more info on IP addresses: https://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=1696588 and
http://kb.iu.edu/data/aakl.html
Thanks to Lifehacker for this useful tip!
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