So, I couldn't make my program on time and got eliminated from the contest to let Daniel Egnor win the conest with his 'Geographic Search' idea which adds the ability to search for web pages within a particular geographic locale to traditional keyword searching. That's very similar to things we were planning to do, converting street addresses to latitude-longitude based cooredinates through publicly available TIGER and FIPS data sources.
Jen McGrath, a software engineer at Google, said Egnor's entry was chosen not just because he had developed a useful application but also because he had "clean" code and, importantly, because his code showed the possibility of "scaling" to work across the entire Web.
He got $10'000 in cash and a VIP visit to Google's office in Mountain View, CA.
But, who is the real winner of the contest? I would say: Google. They now have tons and tons of fresh ideas and a bunch of pre-written, ready and clean code which they legally can glue to their system (although they have said they're not planning to use it for now) by spending approximately one month salary of one of their Phds. List of Winners
Google's Search for Winner Ends, Farhad Manjoo's article in Wired