There is no denying that search engines are impacted on what is happening in the here and now. When the year figures are released to show us all what we were searching for in the previous year, current events and major sporting activities come to the fore. This will be why in 2014 the FIFA World Cup was one of the most popular search terms across the key search engines and it seems as though one of the leading search engines has paid particular attention to this.
Bingo knows that at this time of year, basketball fans and sports betting fans around the world are getting rather excited about March Madness. This is the leading basketball event for college basketball teams in the United States of America and Bingo expects a lot of people to be searching for this sport in the next month. When you think about the fact that there will be over 60 tournament games being played out in three weeks, the betting opportunities for sports fans around the world will be huge, and a lot of people will be looking for as much information as they can get their hands on.
Predicting March Madness results isn’t an easy process
This will be why Bing has partnered up with the NCAA to become the “official bracket data partner for March Madness”. If you are in the dark about this tournament, basically you can plot a team’s path all the way to the final with the brackets (fixtures) outlining the route for every team. There is a great deal of excitement in determining these brackets and this is where a great deal of money will be spent in the next few weeks. Bing will actually be helping basketball lovers to complete their own brackets once the teams have been announced and the first round games have been allocated. This Sunday, the 15th of March, is Selection Sunday and for many fans, it is as exciting as some of the games themselves.
As part of this deal, the NCAA has provided Microsoft with around 10 years of historical data. This information contains details about teams, tournaments, the win:loss ratio of certain teams, statistics relating to home and away results and a whole lot more. This information has been provided to the Principal Applied Science Manager, Walter Sun, and there is currently a great deal of analysing and reviewing taking place at Microsoft. Walter and his team believe that they have identified a number of crucial patterns over the years, which will enable them to make confident predictions about the 2015 March Madness event.
After Selection Sunday has taken place, Bing will be placing a bracket building tool online, which will give fans the chance to work out who will win the individual games and then the eventual tournament.
Bing claim that their prediction capabilities have been hugely successful in the past year. The firm is claiming success in predicting the outcome of the Scottish Independence Referendum, the six major Oscar categories and at least 95% of the US elections last November.