First, I've added some more JSP goodness, and reckon it's a little more obvious re: going from home page to search (place) page, and then selecting categories now does an AJAX search without having to hit the search button.

Also ... thanks Davthalus for the comment. Let me clarify. Ireland has no postcodes, and google's or anybody elses geocoding of street addresses simply isn't anywhere near accurate, especially outside of Dublin (and I'd hazard a guess it's not very accurate even in Dublin ?). The fact is until postcodes come into this country there's no easy way to 'guess' accurately where a particular place actually is, unless you have recorded with it a GPS coord.

But thanks ... as I said ... I'm looking for peoples opinions :0). I suppose the point isn't that people couldn't get directions in other ways ... it's just that google has no need or want to do any heavy lifting in Ireland (no point we're too small a population), so google won't really find a small boutique or hairdresser or chemist in a small village, it can't, since most small shops don't have web presence of any kind and auto-geocoding of addresses in those very same areas is almost useless. Can you imagine getting google to "find the chemist next to the pub with the green door, up the hill on the right ?".