Bing’s prediction engine is having a good summer.
Bing Predicts, which crunches huge amounts of data and uses a series of algorithms to predict who will win everything from the Academy Awards to the Super Bowl, has fared well in picking the outcomes of recent sporting events.
As Microsoft details in this blog post, Bing not only picked the U.S. women’s national soccer team to beat Japan in the World Cup final earlier this month, but also projected all six group stage winners and had a 58 percent success rate in picking each match outcome.
A few weeks later, Bing aced its Wimbledon predictions, correctly picking both Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams to win before the tournament started. It had a 71 percent success rate for predicting each Wimbledon match this year.
Bing also said it is beating Vegas odds for its weekly NASCAR top five predictions so far this season, and also correctly picked the first 14 selections of last month’s NBA Draft.
Bing, which launched its prediction engine in April 2014, also correctly predicted this year’s Super Bowl champion — it picked the Patriots before the playoffs started — as well as the NBA Finals champion and 20 out of 24 Academy Award winners.
The larger idea here for Microsoft is to expose sports fans and others to Bing, with the hope that they’ll stick around to conduct more searches, helping Microsoft gain more traction against market leader Google. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, Microsoft’s search revenue rose 21 percent to $922 million. The company credited the increase to growing Bing search market share and higher revenue per search.
