If you searched on Bing maps last week for Melbourne, you would have instead been re-directed to a spot in the North Pacific Ocean, off the East coast of Japan.
How did this happen? Bing was using inaccurate information from Wikipedia, namely, Wikipedia didn’t include the all-important South on the co-ordinates.
@ssharwood This issue has been fixed. Missing negative sign in Wikipedia data.
— Ricky Brundritt (@rbrundritt) August 22, 2016
Ricky Brunditt, is a Senior Program Manager for Bing Maps, explained the situation to The Register‘s Simon Sharwood.
@ssharwood Not too much. Mainly only for rich description on map website. The developer API’s don’t use this and didn’t have this error.
— Ricky Brundritt (@rbrundritt) August 23, 2016
But Brunditt assures there’s no need to be concerned that the mis-information directed someone into the sea instead the Victorian city.
@sabarinathg The Bing Maps Terms of use don’t allow turn by turn navigation apps to be created.
— Ricky Brundritt (@rbrundritt) August 25, 2016