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Microsoft Lost a City Because They Used Wikipedia Data (theregister.co.uk)
"Microsoft can't tell North from South on Bing Maps," joked The Register, reporting that Microsoft's site had "misplaced Melbourne, the four-million-inhabitant capital of the Australian State of Victoria." Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes:
Though they're trying to minimise it, the recent relocation of Melbourne Australia to the ocean east of Japan in Microsoft's flagship mapping application is blamed on someone having flipped a sign in the latitude given for the city's Wikipedia page. Which may or may not be true. But the simple stupidity of using a globally-editable data source for feeding a mapping and navigation system is ... "awesome" is (for once) an appropriate word.
Well, it's Bing, so at least no-one was actually using it.
"Bing's not alone in finding Australia hard to navigate," reports The Register. "In 2012 police warned not to use Apple Maps as it directed those seeking the rural Victorian town of Mildura into the middle of a desert."
Well, it's Bing, so at least no-one was actually using it.
"Bing's not alone in finding Australia hard to navigate," reports The Register. "In 2012 police warned not to use Apple Maps as it directed those seeking the rural Victorian town of Mildura into the middle of a desert."
Well, it's Bing, so at least no-one was actually using it
Many people use Bing for porn.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Hopefully not taxi drivers in Victoria
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I heard this sort of thing is the real reason Atlantis was lost.
This fucking bullshit again...
So worked up about. You are. English grammar.
#DeleteChrome
The amount of data you need assemble a global navigation system is enormous. You don't hire some intern to transcribe data out of Wikipedia, you license it from companies like Tele Atlas.
Now for geographic place names you'd turn to sources like the USGS GNIS system for the US, whatever the local equivalent of GNIS is, or for places that don't have that datasets like GNIS the DoD's Defense Mapping Agency.
It can't possibly be that Bing gets their place/position data mainly from Wikipedia. The only thing I can think is that they did some kind of union of all the geographic name sources they could find in order to maximize the chance of getting a hit on a place name search, and somehow screwed up prioritizing the most reliable sources first.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I mean, yes, you come off as a mouth breathing moron from the get go, but you didn't even read the summary.
"Bing's not alone in finding Australia hard to navigate," reports The Register. "In 2012 police warned not to use Apple Maps as it directed those seeking the rural Victorian town of Mildura into the middle of a desert."
It was my understanding they have what some call AI screenscrape the data.Other people say it is insufficiently intelligent to be called AI.
This fucking bullshit again...
Awe, did he hurt your feewings?
They could've lost Redmond.
#DeleteChrome
A better choice would be DuckDuckGo or even Yandex.
Microsoft can match up your Windows 10 id to your search history and their new deals to put their office apps on Android means they can link that to your phone number and phone operation. (Note, their apps runs run on Android in the background whether you ever open them or not, and those apps send data to Microsoft all the time).
Microsoft would like to be the next all-spying Google, so best to avoid them too.
Well if that's true it's one of the most spectacularly boneheaded decisions I've ever heard of. People rely on mapping programs for important stuff.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"It's not the lost city. It's the city of the lost."
"Do you have a 'gate address?"
If the AI learned from an intern, maybe it learned to make the same mistakes as the intern....
...the simple stupidity of using a globally-editable data source for feeding a mapping and navigation system is ... "awesome"...
Lots of services and organizations use OpenStreetMaps which is a crowd sourced GIS repository. I don't know how moderation of OSM compares to Wikipedia, but last I heard, Wikipedia is moderated pretty heavily. Isn't over-moderation a big complaint about Wikipedia these days?
When I have a problem with my distro or wanted to download another flavour of Red Had, I just smile and use Bing. You know, just to pi$$ them off.
If not for them walking upside down to counter our shuffles, the world would fall into shambles: we'd have duopolies as ISP's, and orange-haired clowns and email misplacers running for president.
Table-ized A.I.
well, i think it's more a case of bing the *search engine* pulls data from wikipedia (and other common resources) on lots of searches to display on the serp. and they aren't the only one, ddg does the same thing.
where they fucked up was that when someone went to map from *that* data, bing the *maps* used the data passed to it by the *search engine* (i.e. the 'bad' wikipedia data) and didn't consult *its own* (and correct) database... which it should have.
bing the *maps* is not using wikipedia for location data. it simply mapped the location passed to it by a referring page
I always check the streetview of a location I haven't been to before relying on the GPS. There are many places where the GPS is not reliable or the street-view isn't available, therefor it's not out of the question to check with multiple sources.
Well, I live on the other side of the planet. I have heard of Melbourne and know roughly where it is. I have never heard of Mildura which is 10x times smaller. Comparing the size of these blunders is like misplacing a toy truck vs a real motor vehicle.
It was my understanding they have what some call AI screenscrape the data.Other people say it is insufficiently intelligent to be called AI.
So, an H1B screenscraper?
Yeah, me are lucky in Aust for online map quality given that Google Maps, globally, are mostly made here
A holiday in Japan right now would be quite nice.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's in fucking Australia.
Nope. Just had a look at the maps, it's actually in the middle of the Pacific ocean, North hemisphere.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Err, uh, YES, it is a mistake! We have totally not converted the country into a huge ship and are on our way to invade Hawaii. NOTHING TO SEE HERE!
...
In 2012 the whole world mocked Apple Maps for tons of terrible mistake.
It's in fucking Australia.
Will Americans ever stop confusing Australia with Austria?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
long overdue
Well if that's true it's one of the most spectacularly boneheaded decisions I've ever heard of. People rely on mapping programs for important stuff.
People who rely on mapping programs for "important stuff" might want to use a service they pay for with money, instead of one that they pay for with their personal data and the availability of their eyeballs. The former tends to come with either explicit or legally assumed obligations on the part of the provider, while the latter has terms and conditions that hold the provider harmless and put the user at a legal disadvantage. Besides, if it's really important, then it's incumbent upon the user to check more than one source.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
A wild deletionist appeared!
Ezekiel 23:20
Bah, but bing is part of microsoft , and microsoft is part of total information control. And not in a good way. It is pure propaganda and marketing.
Next update will have Melbourne located in Austria.
In a world of constant change, you can always rely on Microsoft to do something stupid. Their saving grace here is that, since Bing is used by a minority, they have little tobe worried about.
With Bing video search, you can mouse over a video to get a preview of it's content. You can also open the video directly instead of going to the page that it's embedded on. Also, Google suffers from a problem where pr0n websites stick up a video until Google indexes it, and when it's in the Google index, they replace it with an ad. Google takes months or years to update the indexed page. It's actually comparatively difficult to find porn on Google, but bing's usually got everything you're looking for on the first page.
As /. regulars are no doubt aware, the Reg has been fighting a single-handed battle against the Wiki for some years now. This has often led to some hilarity, as is the case here.
If one visits the Melbourne page on the Wiki, you'll find the coordinates are correct. If one examines the history, you'll see they have been correct for longer than Bing Maps has existed. There is no error in the data. The problem is MS's import.
Nevertheless, the Reg decides to read MS's tweet another way and blame it all on MS being stupid for trusting the Wiki. This is rather ironic.
The location Bing has for Melbourne is home to the gigantic squid, the most dangerous squid in the world. So of course they assumed it was in Australia.
I realize Melbourne, Australia is a big deal, and it seems like with a city that large, Microsoft and Apple and others could afford to hire one person whose job is to make sure they get stuff right.
But at the same time I find it amazing that they don’t have more mistakes. The navicable roads across the whole world are vast, and living in an imperfect world, there’s alway going to be some probability and degree or error in everything we do. Getting Melbourne’s location wrong because Microsoft may have copied Wikipedia is funny. But when it comes down to it, for all the things they could have wrong, this mistake constitutes a SINGLE BIT error. Yeah, it’s a super big deal bit, but in terms of raw information content, you have to be surprised that they don’t suffer from single-bit errors all the time in less significant but noticable ways.
Also, given what we all SHOULD know about science, we should understand that every model of anything is going to be correct only within certain statistical bounds. Yes, that the universe was smaller in the past and has to have been dense enough to have undergone a phase change (cf. CMB), so the big bang as a whole is essentially settled. However, there are details we don’t have filled in yet, so whenever someone comes out with some new alternative to inflation, we look at it with a critical eye. We should be doing the same when it comes to these electronic gadgets we use. There are many different failure modes. When we become so trusting and dependent on them that we can’t recover from their failure, then we’ve got a problem. They’re never going to be perfect. Moreover, different services will implement different algorithms that will give us different results. When navigating somewhere, you need to use your brain to decide which route is best, not just trust what the routing algorithm says. Moreover, local knowledge always trumps an algorithm whose knowledge of traffic patterns and back roads is extremely limited.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m a little to the east of Binghamton University on Vestal Parkway. If I ask either Google or Apple Maps where the nearest gas station is, they BOTH give me a location on the opposite (north) side of the river in Johnson City. Why? Because they use cartesian distance. As the crow flies, that gas station is the closest, but to get there, I would have to back-track to the west to 201, take it north to Riverside Drive, and then back-track to the east. Either that or try to drive across the river. A much FASTER gas station to get to from there (although with only a slightly shorter total driving distance) is actually in Binghamton, to the east, on the same (south) side of the river, where there are no turns or traffic lights in the way. In other words, these routing algorithms are stupid about rivers and other common traffic phenomena. And of course none of these have a way to consider the fact that I actually live in Vestal and am likely to want find a gas station between where I am and my house. Sure, they’ll list multiple gas stations, and I can choose the right one, but this is an example of needing to use my brain to make the decision, rather than relying blindly on software.
Australia seems to be a problem for Garmin maps as well. I purchased the extra Oz-NZ map for my Garmin GPS and in NZ it was fine, but in Aus it was often off by several Kms putting the town center of many of the smaller towns 2-3 miles off of the main hwy where there was nothing resembling a town center. To the locals this was a common complaint from tourists.
Not if your in the middle of the outback, in the searing heat with not enough fuel or water because the map told you that this was a town.
I just tried searching for Melbourne on maps.bing.com. The search box's auto complete came up with Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and I selected it from the drop down. The results? "We couldn't find any matches for ..."
Hilarious!