Our recent post about place names at Ancestry.com brought some behind-the-scenes responses from readers.
Yes, you can just type in the location in the box and ignore the "drop-down" list. I typed in "altona" and obtained search results for that location.
However, if you have word in the location box at Ancestry.com when searching that is not from the drop-down menu, the restriction option on the location does not work and "neighboring" and other choices are not available.
I suspect that the "neighboring" option only works at the county level in United States census records, but I have yet to test this theory.