How does trace-ip.org work?

Every device on a network is identified using a unique address called IP-address (IP means Internet Protocol). When you open a website, you send out a query to find your website (e.g. trace-ip.org, that is called a DNS-query), and upon receiving information about it, your browser can connect to the right server, downloading contents of the site.

In fact, not only web servers but any online device can be identified with this method, and allowing us to look up some basic information about the IP-address you provided.

The standard of IP-addresses has been IPv4 for quite long, which, in a human readable format, consists of four numbers, each ranges from 0 to 255: e.g. 35.173.48.18. This allows ~4,294,967,296 different IP-addresses to be assigned to different devices (and yes, that's a lot).

However, due to so many devices connecting to the internet, a newer standard has been finalized to allow even more connections - that is IPv6. Learn more about the background here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address