Follow NCAA March Madness with Google Web Apps

by Clint Boulton

Google created the map to the left to show the key locations for the tournament. The East division is indicated by a blue pin; South with green; Midwest with red; and West with cyan. Access the full College Basketball Tournament 2010 map here.

Those 4 pins with a dot in the center represent the No. 1 seeds: Kansas, Kentucky, Duke and Syracuse. Clicking on them surfaces more information about the schools.

On the left of the large tournament map is a list of the arenas hosting games for the tournament.

Clicking on these links reveals more info on the schools hosting games.

All 14 arenas for the tourney are depicted in the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. See them in this video.

Google also created this Web page with additional Google tools for tracking the tournament.

From that page, click to add a gadget to your iGoogle page so you can track basketball game scores in near real time. Just don’t let your boss catch you.

Check out what fellow B-Ball fans are saying about the games from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other sources here in real time.

Forget to fill out a bracket? We won’t tell. Use this bracket template from Google Docs.

The bracket template comes courtesy of the Google Tournament function, which returns data for games occurring during the NCAA Division I Basketball Championship for men’s and women’s teams. Use this tool to create your own brackets, then see your predictions evaluated after the two games that determine the final result are over.