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."

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Yandex or DuckDuckGo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's hard to believe.

[im_thatoneguy]

It's hard to believe because if you read TFA the editor proved that they didn't read the article. The source for "we use Wikipedia" also said they just use it for metadata on locations and the actual location API didn't get the location wrong just the search engine subject result.