Bing Partners With NCAA, Will Predict March Madness Games & Help Fans Complete Brackets

Bing will turn its predictive science smarts toward the unpredictable college basketball tournament.

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Bing is turning its predilection for making predictions toward March Madness.

Microsoft has partnered with the NCAA to become the “official bracket data partner for March Madness,” and will help college basketball fans fill out their brackets after the tournament brackets are announced this Sunday.

As part of this partnership, NCAA has pulled 10 years of raw historical data about teams, tournaments, win loss ratio, home vs. away stats, etc. and provided it to Microsoft’s Walter Sun, principal applied science manager, to analyze and review. After culling through the information, running through Bing’s algorithms and leveraging machine learning, Walter and his team have been able to identify key patterns over the years that contribute to a team’s success.

Following the “Selection Sunday” TV broadcast, Bing will use that data to help fans pick the winners of each game via an online bracket-building tool.

And that’s not all. Bing will also offer its own predictions for the entire tournament, so we’ll all get to see whether man or machine is better at navigating the unpredictability of March Madness.

Bing’s been pretty accurate since launching its predictions feature almost a year ago. It correctly predicted the Scottish independence “no” vote last fall, and got more than 95 percent of US elections correct in November. It just predicted all six of the major categories in last month’s Oscar Awards. But I think many college basketball fans will agree with me when I say that March Madness is an entirely different kind of challenge. Good luck, Bing. You’re probably gonna need it.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Matt McGee
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Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.

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