It’s Time for Racing to Partner With Microsoft

Bing wants partners

If you are like us, getting race results, historical data, replays or pretty much anything else to do with racing is a maze. Equibase is the central de facto source, but DRF has results, as do ADWs. Sometimes YouTube has race replays, sometimes ADWs do, and sometimes track web sites do. One stop shopping? Hardly. Half the time I do not even know where to go, whether on my desktop, netbook or BlackBerry. In harness racing it is as bad or worse, with several data publishers moving in seemingly different directions.

Search engines can fix much of it. And for other sports, they have done just that.

In the UK, Google has partnered with soccer to give flash results, stats and more. If you search for a soccer team — in this case Arsenal — you immediately see the past results and the next game. In addition, you can drill down to see stats, historical results and so on:

This has not gone unnoticed across the pond. Google has done the same for many major sports in North America.

Microsoft’s search engine has joined the fray of late, trying to be a player. They are fighting for market share from search giant Google and they have spent oodles of cash on web marketing, partnerships and scores of television commercials. Slowly but surely they are increasing search market share. Just this past week they announced their excellent real-time NBA search algorithm. Others are doing this, like Google, but Microsoft plans to go one better.

Here is a screen shot when you search the LA Lakers, courtesy the Bing Blog:

How about searching for a player like Lamar Odom?

I hope this has piqued your interest, because it sure piqued mine.

R2 contributor Jules Boven, Marketing manager of harnesslink.com, wrote an article about this concept, creating a mock-up of what this would look like in Google for a harness horse named Arch Madness, the 2007 Breeders Crown Champion trotter. All you have to do is type in “pp” and the horse’s name, and voila!

So, whether you are at a restaurant or at the track, and you want to look at the trip notes for a horse coming up in the sixth, or maybe you want an easy link to a race replay without logging into your ADW and waiting and waiting with slow bandwidth, or maybe you want a horse’s last running line because you see something on the simulcast channel that catches your eye, you would type your query into a search engine, get the results, and then maybe make a play.

In addition, this could revolutionize the way data is stored for racing. We have not done well at all storing our history. This might be a way to start such a project.

If I were racing, or if racing had a central authority, I think I would be looking into a partnership not with Google, but with Bing. Working historical results, video replays, blogs and more into the search engine, just like other sports have done, would have to help us. Bing could be the search engine of choice for racing — and racing would give back by promoting it as such. And we do have a lot going for us in this regard. Racing is a data-rich game; making Bing the official search partner would surely bring them a whole lot of eyeballs, which is exactly what they are searching for.

Is it a win-win? I think so. Is it doable? I do not know, but if other sports can do it, I think we should be looking at partnerships like this in racing to help brand us for 2010 and beyond.