New : Try the demo on a map with the leaflet plugin
The worldwide geocoding webservice is totally FREE and allow to find GPS coordinate and other informations for a given text (address, street name, city, zip,...) in 243 countries, via a REST webservice. You can geocode structured or unstructured addresses. The address parser can parse address and extract seperate parts. Gisgraphy also offers Premium hosted services and consulting.
It uses (free) data from OpenstreetMap that are imported into a local database.
Gisgraphy doesn't use Google Maps geocoder, it do it by itself..
You can see an example of use bellow. You can find documentation on how to use the XML API of the webservice and see how to download and install Gisgraphy.
Geocoder found GPS coordinate of an address, a city or a street. If you want to search for other things than an address (adm, hotel, monument,...), use the fulltext engine. If you want to divide an address into its individual component parts, use the address parser.