Reading this discussion reminded me of the flickr API. Might be another good way to find geo locations? Perhaps using it in combination with Placemaker could help reduce the error rate. I think with flickr you can only search for specific words, but on the other hand you can find locations for things (like "Notre Dame"), not only for names of places.
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/flickr.places.find.html
