Hi LeeW
I suspect it's because the Google maps plot off the 6 figure Landranger reference, e.g. AB123456 for UK mines, therefore all it does is place the mine with a 100m square.
For international mines it uses lat/long which is rather more accurate.
Next year (early on hopefully) I want to set aside a week to rip out a lot of site code to do with mine searching and plotting (all 5 years old now) and re-write it to make it a lot more searchable, a lot faster and a lot easier to use. Looking at mapping 'issues' will be part of this, including fixing the long standing issue of 'mines near' where the mine is close to the edge of the map sheet. Probably this will involve using lat/long for all mapping / plotting / proximity functions with lat/long being worked out from grid reference if not already entered.
In fact I'm intending to re-write quite a lot of the site, doing some of the groundwork at the moment, but core stuff like searching for mines and photos and the forum will be the core of the make it faster / make it easier to use re-write.
my orders are to sit here and watch the world go by