If you’ve been watching the World Cup this summer you might have seen Google’s attempt to predict the outcome of matches by the 90-minute mark. Now that the World Cup is coming to an end Google has decided to continue testing the feature for Premier League matches which are played around the U.K.
Google has not announced the win-draw-lose probability feature for the Premier League, which starts on August 10th, just yet but the feature is already live. It’s the only league in the U.K. that has the feature switched on, and seemingly the only league in Europe to have the feature too. Neither the French Ligue 1 or German Bundesliga have the feature switched on and the Italian and Spanish leagues have not yet announced their fixtures so it’s not possible to know if the feature will be enabled in those leagues.
The probabilities that Google has produced have been a bit hit and miss over the duration of the World Cup, for example, yesterday it said England should win (43%) or there ought to be a draw (33%) - after 90 minutes, the match was a draw rather than a win for England. Going forward, it has Belgium with a 43% chance to win in the third-place playoff against England"s (30%), and it says France should win the cup with 49% against Croatia’s 22% - it’ll be interesting to see how that one turns out.