14 DAY TRIAL // Map services have become super popular these days, and everyone seems to be using them, especially for their daily commute given the fact that most also include traffic information.
And yet, Australians living in Melbourne and using Bing Maps were surprised to find out that Microsoft actually placed their city in the wrong hemisphere due to what seemed to be an issue affecting coordinates.
As The Reg reports, whenever users searched for Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on Bing Maps, Microsoft claimed the city was at 37.813610, 144.963100, and while the coordinates were right, not the same thing could be said about the hemisphere.
Blaming Wikipedia
When contacted on Twitter, Microsoft actually acknowledged the bug and blamed Wikipedia for putting Melbourne in the wrong hemisphere. While it’s a little surprising to see a company the size of Microsoft relying on a service such as Wikipedia, which anyone can edit freely, it’s important to note that the developer APIs didn’t have this error.
“This issue has been fixed. Missing negative sign in Wikipedia data,” Microsoft’s Ricky Brundritt explained. “Not too much,” he added when being asked how much Bing relies on Wikipedia. ”Mainly only for rich description on map website. The developer API's don't use this and didn't have this error. This issue was limited to a few regions as duplicate entries for this result were in data.”
Leaving this error aside, which Microsoft fixed very fast anyway, it’s worth mentioning that Bing Maps is improving substantially these days, as the firm is putting a lot of effort into getting it right.
The service receives large updates every month that bring not only improvements but also new features, as is the case of the August 2016 update that included three new road maps styles, high contrast support, animated tile layers, and several under-the-hood enhancements to refine performance on all devices.