With the NCAA March Madness tournament now well on its way, most college basketball fans will have filled their tournament brackets to test their luck at predicting this year’s champion.
Staff at Microsoft’s search engine Bing took making match predictions to record-breaking levels last week, after gathering 298 people at their offices in Bellevue, Washington, USA, to take the title for Largest gathering of people filling out a sports tournament bracket simultaneously.
The participants, who were all Microsoft employees, filled in online brackets to beat the previous record of 250.
The attempt came as Bing published its official March Madness predictions using its own specially devised algorithms.
Taking into account more than a decade of NCAA historical data, the search engine has also sorted through specific data from each game this season such as win/loss ratio and the distance from a team’s home campus to a given game, as well as using “social signals indicating the wisdom of the crowd” to come up with its set of conclusions.
Bing's record comes after a successful attempt last year by Sport Graphics at the record for Largest sports tournament bracket after their 165-foot construction was attached to the east side of the JW Marriott hotel in Indianapolis.