If you’re in Canada (or anywhere else outside USA), and have been trying to use Bing Maps to return local listings of businesses – you might have been wondering why Bing Maps seems to be broken. And by broken, I mean that searching for local businesses doesn’t seem to be working. If so, you need to read on!
I actually found this bug (or limitation by-design) by accident one day when I was playing around with my Language settings one day. If you currently *do not* have your Windows Phone 7 regional and language settings set to English (US) – then local search listings have been disabled, and searching for “sushi” in Bing Maps would have returned nothing! To fix this – follow these steps:
NOTE: This method works for Canadian users and *possibly* users of other countries outside the US – but I can’t confirm myself. Please post in the comments if it works/doesn’t work for you! (Current list of non working countries: Australia)
1) Go to Settings, then Region and Language options.
2) Change the following settings to “English (United States)”:
“Region Format” and
”System Locale” and
”Browser and search language”
3) Reboot your phone.
When it’s back online – test out Bing Maps or regular Bing Search! You’ll now have a tab called “Local” which will give you listings of local businesses!
The best way to check is to open up Bing Maps, and pick an area in your city with a fast-food chain you know of (Subway, McDonalds, etc), and do a search! Bing Maps should now return a whole bunch of results and clicking on one of them will bring up information about the business/directions/phone/nearby businesses! Unfortunately, the Reviews tab doesn’t seem to work for any restaurant I’ve tried – so I’m not sure how reliable that is.
Anyway, enjoy the *real* Bing search capabilities now!