March 13th marks “Selection Sunday”, which celebrates the arrival of March Madness. On Selection Sunday, the NCAA announces which men and women’s basketball teams qualify for the annual tournament that ultimately determines each year’s champion. Now for the second year in a row, Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will partner with the NCAA to help provide users with an interactive March Madness experience.
Bing will release an app across Microsoft phones, tablets and computers, which hopes to deliver its users a live feed of scores, alerts and game highlights. Bing will also be integrating its Bing Predicts feature to better inform its users about the strength of each team, so users can hopefully build better brackets.
Of course, brackets are the centerpiece for any March Madness viewing party. With nine-quintillion bracket combinations, nobody has ever filled out a perfect bracket. However, with the evolution of advanced statistics and incorporation of algorithms, such as Bing Predicts, March Madness fans will undoubtedly delude themselves into thinking that this is the year they make a perfect bracket. Even just filling out a perfect round is incredibly difficult. In fact, billionaire Warren Buffet announced that he will award $1 million to any of his companies’ employees who complete two perfect rounds of their bracket. Yet with the odds being so slim, it would be to nobody’s surprise if not a single one of Buffet’s 361,270 employees wins.
March Madness will tip-off March 15th and continue into April. Currently, Bing users can see each Division 1 team’s chances to making the tournament when they search their team on Bing.