The query syntax is pretty cool, but as far as raw geocoding I don't really get it -- Google has a much bigger dataset than this, offers reverse geocoding just

The query syntax is pretty cool, but as far as raw geocoding I don't really get it -- Google has a much bigger dataset than this, offers reverse geocoding just fine (With good neighborhood data in the US and Europe). And I gather you are just proxying requests to twitter and flickr (and not actually storing all this for all places yourself) -- why wouldn't I just query their APIs directly? Not trying to be snarky, I just don't understand....