Microsoft’s Bing search engine can do a lot more than simple searches. Recently, the company started dabbling in the ‘predictive’ arena with trying to anticipate who would get voted off TV shows.
With the World Cup kicking off this week, Bing is now taking its prediction tool to the football (or "soccer") pitch and will take a shot at seeing who will win each game. You can search an individual match over at Bing or simply type ‘World Cup prediction’ to get the results that you see at the top of this page.
Bing Predictions is an interesting application for the search engine as it takes a forward-looking approach to data driven results. Of course, the predictions will not be perfect as there are more variables involved than any machine can account for, at least at this time.
With that being said, we will be curious to see how accurate the predictions are at the end of the World Cup. If Bing can prove to be accurate within a reasonable degree of the results, the tool could prove valuable in predicting the outcome of other events like elections or other sporting events.
Bing has been expanding its footprint recently by becoming the default option for not only Windows 8, but also Apple’s Siri and OS X 10.10. While Google still commands a significant lead in search market share, with Bing gaining new features and being integrated into more platforms, the search service should continue to grow over the next few years.
Source: Bing