I have been looking through the documentation for the API and not sure if it is possible to list multiple select stores near the submitted address.
Ultimately something like the following website: http://www.evolutionofsmooth.com/locator/
It seems like they have each location stored in a db but I can't see it that likely since it would be pretty huge to do something like that.
Any ideas?
They probably did store all the shops in a database. They saved the latitude and longitude of each shop. Then they load, via AJAX, all the shops into the google map. Google maps has a tutorial for creating a storelocator.
Google maps api v3 has a function called ClientLocation this can, on base of the IP-address, return the current position of the user viewing the google map. This way the closest shops can be highlighted or put on top of the list.
Hopes this will help!