Does Google Maps API offer a way to search for locations by name?
What you are looking is Geocoding API from google maps.
UPDATE 5/12/2011
Google just opened up public access to their Places API. This is more to the heart of the original question request:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/autocomplete.html
I think you're looking for the google.maps.Geocoder class:
A service for converting between an address and a LatLng.