Google Joins the Cricket World Cup

Google tries to get more involved into the sports area as the company announced today a new page especially designed for the upcoming Cricket World Cup. This year, the competition will take place in West Indies and will start on March 13. Under the "Join in the World Cup excitement" title, the website promotes some Google products such as two gadgets for the Personalized Homepage, five gadgets for Google Desktop, a blog and an orkut community to allow visitors to communicate.

"Google tries to show the usefulness of some of its tools by connecting them to an important event. Probably the most successful promotion of a Google product happened last year and was a contest that advertised a movie called The Da Vinci Code," Ionut Alex reported.

Although the company didn't make any official announcement of the new page, it is quite interesting because Google is more and more involved into the sports market after numerous partnerships were already confirmed. Take the example of YouTube, the online video sharing site that allows users to upload, share and comment movies with other members of the community. Recently, YouTube made almost 1.000 agreements with numerous companies but the most important ones are surely the ones concerning NBA, Chelsea FC and BBC.

Using the partnerships with NBA and Chelsea FC, YouTube created two new pages to display sports content such as basketball movies, football news or the latest headlines concerning a certain domain. The BBC agreement is also used by YouTube to build new channels on the video service, the company planning to develop 3 new sites: 2 of them especially built for news content and one of the pages will concern the entertainment area.