It looks to me that the http://maps.google.com/maps/geo service doesn't
always return valid UTF8.

For example:

wget http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?key=<mykey>&q=cologne&output=xml

returns references to "Köln" but with the o umlaut represented by its
latin1 code of 0xF6 rather than 0xC3:0xB6 which is what it should be in
UTF8.

This seems to happen for both xml and json response formats despite the
xml version claiming an encoding of "UTF-8" in its xml declaration.