Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU) has an answer for the billion fans of football across the globe, who are curious to know the country that will have the privilege of taking the much coveted FIFA World Cup trophy home. The final match is to be held between Germany and Argentina, and Baidu strongly feels that the honor of winning will be enjoyed by Germany.
How Baidu makes predictions
The success of any prediction is hugely dependent on the five major factors, which have been highlighted by Baidu Inc’s Beijing Big Data Lab’s head Zhang Tong. The data and model taken for making predictions plays an important role in the accuracy of predictions and for making the predictions of the World Cup 2014 winner Baidu based its analysis on factors; team strength, home court advantage, recent game performance, overall World Cup performance, and bookmaker odds. Zhang was the leader of the team that was responsible for designing and development of the technology used in making the predictions.
Baidu has made the predictions by picking data based on the five factors, and the data set has been classified into various parameters and dimensions. Baidu even came up with a chart and a dedicated World Cup forecast page to highlight its supremacy in predictions.
Tech giants and World Cup predictions
Unlike the previous world cup seasons, this time the leading tech companies are taking much more interest in making predictions on the World Cup winners, and have sidelined the professional soccer analysts including popular Paul, the Octopus. The more exciting part of the news is that the predictions made by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Goldman Sachs have been very much accurate with regards to winners in quarter final and group of 16 games. 
There had been an unsuccessful prediction by the cloud platform of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), when it predicted the winner of the quarter-final match between France and Germany. They later issued an explanatory note on their website that stated:
“…France took more shots than Germany, had more shots on target, and their shots were from a more ‘dangerous location’ (that is, closer to the goal). This information complements actual goals to form an ‘expected goals’ statistic in our model.”
Baidu is favoring Germany to take the World Cup while Microsoft is backing Argentina, and Google is yet to come up with the name. The game on field will surely be interesting, but the off the field game between the tech giants will also be worth watching.
