Does Google Maps API offer a way to search for locations by name?

Question

When one visits http://maps.google.com, they are able to type queries into the search field and receive results based on locations or places, and not hard search results, as the

Answer 1

What you are looking is Geocoding API from google maps.

Find Documentation here

UPDATE 5/12/2011

Google just opened up public access to their Places API. This is more to the heart of the original question request:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/autocomplete.html