If you enter a search term and just hit enter Google will try and guess which result you want (like the I feel Lucky button). The auto-complete will give more

If you enter a search term and just hit enter Google will try and guess which result you want (like the I feel Lucky button). The auto-complete will give more options to pick the correct place name from duplicate names in different places. I think they do a bad job of surfacing the different possible results. The Google Index does seem to lack a lot of more obscure names. In this case I would rather have high quality authoritative gazetteers than an algorithm that tries to guess what I mean.