Last time I checked it was 2012 and given all the excitement about open data in the US government, I would have expected the USGS (or anyone) providing a friendly GNIS based gazetteer service. I send the service a place name and a state and it returns a coordinate pair.
Sure there's Google Maps API, geonames.org, Nominatim, The National Map and a whole host of other services that require agreeing to a end user license, compile a number of data sources into one, return more than I need or want, not open data, not open source and on and on.
In less time than I spent searching for a service, I rolled my own gazetteer of sorts. I downloaded the GNIS national file and created a sqlite database
And here's a quick ruby script to query the database.
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