The 2014 World Cup is set to kick off, and tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Twitter are all taking a shot at covering the event.
Google has announced that users searching for “World Cup” – either by itself or followed by a country name (for example “World Cup Australia”) – will be taken to a special page with team lineups, live scores, information about attempted goals and player stats.
Users will be able to switch between standings, schedules, specific teams and players from the page, along with a timeline covering key highlights during matches.
Meanwhile, Android users will see a special front page on Google Now which will list matches, allowing users to tap on a match to see more detail.
The search giant has also set up a special World Cup edition of its Google Trends service that lists which teams and players are trending during the tournament.
Not to be outplayed, Google rival Microsoft has announced it’s adding a feature called predictions, which displays a list of match results to users searching for “predictions” in its Bing search engine.
In an official statement, the tech giant explained how its predictions will be calculated.
“For the tournament, our models evaluate the strength of each team through a variety of factors such as previous win/loss/tie record in qualification matches and other international competitions and margin of victory in these contests, adjusted for location since home field advantage is a known bias,” said Microsoft.
“Further adjustments are made related to other factors which give one team advantages over another, such as home field (for Brazil) or proximity (South American teams), playing surface (hybrid grass), game-time weather conditions, and other such factors.”
Similar to Google, Microsoft is also displaying special pages of information for users searching in Bing for “World Cup Schedule” or “World Cup Scores”.
Meanwhile, Mozilla has announced a partnership with Goal.com to create a free sidebar for its Firefox web browser. Users can add the sidebar by clicking this link.
Finally, Twitter has created lists containing the official Twitter accounts of 30 of the 32 nations competing in the World Cup, along with a list of all the players, along with a list of all the Australian players.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
